Didier Henrion was born in Creutzwald, Northeastern France, in 1971.
Currently he is a CNRS "Directeur de Recherche" (senior researcher) at LAAS in the research group POP. He is also holding a secondary appointment as a Professor at the Department of Automatic Control of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague.
He received the "Diplôme d'Ingénieur" (Engineer's Degree) and the "Diplôme d'Etudes Approfondies" (Masters' Degree) with specialization in control from Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA, National Institute for Applied Sciences), Toulouse, Southwestern France, in September 1994. From October 1994 to December 1995 he was a research assistant at Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela. From February 1996 to December 1998 he was a Ph.D. student at Ústav Teorie Informace a Automatizace (ÚTIA, Institute of Information Theory and Automation), Prague, Czech Republic. From October 1996 to August 1999 he was a Ph.D. student at Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes (LAAS, Laboratory of Analysis and Architecture of Systems) of Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, National Center for Scientific Research) in Toulouse, France.
He received the "Candidate of Sciences" (Ph.D.) degree from Akademie Věd České Republiky (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic) in December 1998, the "Diplôme de Doctorat" (Ph.D. degree) from INSA Toulouse in October 1999, the "Diplôme d'Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches" (French Habilitation) degree from Université Paul Sabatier de Toulouse in December 2007, and the "Docent" (Czech Habilitation) degree from České Výsoké Učení Technické v Praze (ČVUT, Czech Technical University in Prague) in June 2008. In 2013 he was awarded the grade of Professor of Technical Cybernetics in the Czech Republic.
In 2004 he was awarded the Bronze Medal from CNRS, for his achievements in systems control theory. In 2005 he was awarded, jointly with Fredrik Kahl, the David Marr Prize for the best paper at the International Conference on Computer Vision. In 2011, upon recommendation by a committee of the French Académie des Sciences, he was awarded a scientific grant by the Simone and Cino del Duca Foundation of the Institut de France, on the topic of applied mathematics. In 2012 he was awarded, jointly with Jérôme Malick, the Charles Broyden prize for the best paper in the journal Optimization Methods and Sofware. In 2016 he was awarded, jointly with Cédric Josz, the Optimization Letters Best Paper Award. He is the recipient of the IFAC French NMO Award 2020.