Christian Zirpins studied computer science and business administration with focus on distributed information systems, e-Commerce as well as agent- and component-oriented software systems engineering at the University of Hamburg. He received his MSc  in Computer Science (Dipl.-Inform.) in 1999 for his master thesis on "Foundations of Component-Oriented Software".

From 2000 to 2006, Christian was a research engineer and doctoral candidate with Prof. Dr. Winfried Lamersdorf in the Distributed Systems and Information Systems Group (VSIS) at Hamburg University, where he played a major role in several research and development projects on middleware support for component and service-oriented software systems. There, he received his PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) for his thesis on "Interaction-Oriented Composition of Virtual Service Processes".

In 2006, Christian was awarded a 2-year Marie Currie Research Fellowship for his project on "Pattern-based Architectures for Service Interaction". To conduct his research, he relocated to the UK and joined Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Emmerich in the Software Systems Engineering Group (SSE) at University College London as a research fellow.

In 2008, Christian joined the newly established Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) as a senior research associate. Since then he acts as a lecturer, research team leader and project manager in the eOrganization group of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stefan Tai.

Since 2000, Christian published more than 45 workshop, conference and journal papers. He is a member of various programme and organization committees of scientific workshops and conferences and acts as a reviewer for a range of major scientific journals. Currently, his research interests revolve around dynamic collaborative networks as well as service-oriented design and development methodology.