Hendrik Hildebrandt took up his physics degree at the University of Bonn in 1999 and obtained his PhD in astronomy in 2007. From 2007 to 2010, he worked as postdoc researcher at Universiteit Leiden, the Netherlands. Subsequently, he was awarded a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada. From 2012 to 2018, Hildebrandt headed an Emmy Noether Research Group at the University of Bonn. In December 2018, he was appointed to the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy at Ruhr University Bochum.
He performs a precise test of the standard model of cosmology.