Randall Hulet was educated in physics at Stanford University and MIT. After stints as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and the National Institutes of Science and Technology in Boulder, CO, he joined the faculty of Rice University where he is now the Fayez Sarofim Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He works in the field of ultra-low temperature atomic gases, where his group was among the first three to achieve Bose-Einstein condensation of an atomic gas in 1995. Hulet's current interest is the application of fermionic atomic gases for simulating fundamental models of condensed matter physics.

Hulet has received various awards and honors, including the I.I. Rabi Prize and the Davisson-Germer Prize from the American Physical Society, the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Herbert Walther Award from the Optical Society of America and the German Physical Society, the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, and the Willis E. Lamb Medal for Laser Science and Quantum Optics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Optical Society of America.