Stanislav Zivny grew up in Soběslav, a small town in the south of Bohemia, in the Czech Republic. Before going to England, he read computer science in the Czech republic, Netherlands, and Finland. Zivny went to Oxford in 2006 and spent the following six years there: three years as a doctoral student working on his thesis, The complexity and expressive power of valued constraints, which won the 2011 ACP doctoral research award and was then published by Springer as a monograph, and three years as a stipendiary Junior Research Fellow in Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Oxford's University College. After a year as a Senior Research Fellow in Discrete Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Warwick, he returned to Oxford in 2013.