Hans R Griem received his Ph.D. from the Universität of Kiel, Germany, in 1954 and accepted a Fulbright Fellowship working on upper atmospheric physics at University of Maryland (UMD). He returned to Universität Kiel for a two-year appointment before joining the UMD faculty in 1957. He spent the majority of his career at UMD, consulting with Los Alamos National Laboratory throughout.

He was a fellow of the American Physical Society and a referee for several journals, including Physical Review Letters. He received many recognitions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Humboldt Award and the William F. Meggers Award of the Optical Society in 1987. In 1991 he received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics.