Guenther Walther studied mathematics, computer science, and economics at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Statistics from UC Berkeley.

His research has focused on statistical methodology for detection problems, shape-restricted inference, and mixture analysis, and on statistical problems in astrophysics and in flow cytometry.

He received a Terman fellowship, a NSF CAREER award, and the Distinguished Teaching Award of the Dean of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, the Annals of Statistics, the Annals of Applied Statistics, and Statistical Science. He was program co-chair of the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and served on the executive committee of IMS from 1998 to 2012.

He served as chairman of the Department of Statistics at Stanford from 2015 to 2018 and as director of the undergraduate Mathematical and Computational Science program from 2019 to 2024. He launched and directed a new undergraduate major in Data Science from 2022 to 2024.