Henning Galinski hails from Marl-Polsum, Germany. He studied Physics at Westfälische-Wilhelms-University Münster, Germany, where he graduated in 2007. He then carried out his PhD thesis in the Group of Nonmetallic Inorganic Materials at ETH Zürich under the supervision of Prof. Ludwig Gauckler. Currently he holds a joint position as associate in the Capasso Group at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and as senior scientist at the Laboratory for Nanometallurgy at the ETH Zürich. He is principle investigator of the industry-funded "Size Matters!" project, a multi-institutional research program studying size effects in nanostructured materials.

Galinski has received the Werner Köster Prize from the German Society for Materials Science (DGM) and the Carl Hanser Publishing Company in 2008.  He has also been awarded with the ETH medal by ETH Zurich for his doctoral thesis in 2012. He was runner up in the 2012 Materials Research Prize by the Material Research Center in Zurich.