A native of West Germany, Seel received a master's degree in physics in 1973 from the Technical University of Munich. He started his doctoral studies at George Washington University and his research at the National Institutes of Health.

After receiving a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry/computational solid state physics from the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg in 1978, he spent a postdoctoral year at the IBM research laboratory in San Jose, California. He taught at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg until joining the Michigan Tech faculty as an associated professor of physics in 1986. He became head of the Department of Computer Science in 1988 and was promoted to full professor of physics in 1989. In January of 1990 he was named interim dean, and from 1991 to 2008 he was the dean of the College of Sciences and Arts.

Seel is a member of the American Physical Society, Sigma Pi Sigma, and Sigma Xi. He is referee for numerous journals in physics and computational chemistry. He is the author of 80 publications and has been an invited speaker at universities, conferences and industry laboratories in the USA and Europe. His research areas are computational solid state physics and quantum chemistry.

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