Dr. Frank received 1978 a diploma in engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland and a Dr. sc.techn. (the equivalent of a Ph.D. ETH confers) from the same institute 1982.

Prior to the chair at the Technical University Vienna, Dr. Frank has been a professor of Land Information Studies in the Department of Surveying Engineering at the University of Maine. He was also co-founder and later head of the Maine branch of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), a research center funded by the National Science Foundation.

Since 1980 Dr. Frank has published widely on database management systems for GIS, in particular on spatial access methods and spatial query languages. In 1990, he published a book on Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space with David Mark and in 1996‘Geographic Objects with Indeterminate Boundaries’ with Peter Burrough. He edited Life and Motion of Socio-Economic Units, published 1991, together with Jonathan Raper and Jean-Paul Cheylan.He organized the Conference on Spatial Theory (COSIT) in 1992, 1993, 1995 and 1997, with proceedings published by Springer-Verlag in the Series Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

He was Professor of Geoinformation at the Technical University of Vienna since 1991. He taught courses in spatial information systems, representation of geometric data, design of Geographic Information Systems for administration and business, and economic and administrative strategies for the introduction of GIS. In 1999 he became head of the newly founded Institute for Geoinformation and Land Surveying, which has merged into the Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation of the Technical University Vienna.

As professor at TU Wien, he led an active research group focusing on problems of spatial cognition, user interfaces for GIS, and the economic and organizational aspects of the collection, management and use of geographic information. This work is supported by industry and research foundations. He was involved in several research projects of the European Commission. 1995 he completed a project to organize an international post-graduate course in GIS.

He is Corresponding Member of the Austrian Geodetic Commission and a Corresponding Member of the German Geodetic Commission. In 2004 he was awarded the Grosses Silbernes Ehrenzeichen(Commander’s Cross II-nd class) by the President of the Republic Austria for his contribution. He received in 2011 a honorary doctorate from University of Debrecen (Hungary).

Since 2016, Dr. Andrew U. Frank is emeritus professor from Technical University Vienna.