Marshall V. Hall was born in Perth, Australia in 1943. He received the B.Sc. degree in physics from the University of Western Australia in 1965, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering (acoustics) from the University of New South Wales in 1974.
In 1967, he was employed as a Scientific Officer to study acoustic scattering and propagation at the Royal Australian Navy Research Laboratory (RANRL), which was later to become a branch of the Maritime Operations Division of the Defence Science and Technology Organization (DSTO). In 1981-1982, he was an exchange scientist at the (then) Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego, working mainly with Mel Pedersen and David Gordon on ray and mode theories. Since 1986, he has been a Principal Research Scientist with DSTO, modeling and measuring acoustic propagation with the aims of benchmarking models and characterising the seabed. Dr. Hall is a member of the Acoustical Society of America, the Australian Acoustical Society, and the American Geophysical Union.