Christian Iwainsky studied computer science at Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and specialized in High Performance Computing through his studies in compilers, system simulations, computer graphics and physics. As a student he visited the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2007 for half a year as an intern working on the ROSE source-to-source compiler framework. The results of this work became part of this diploma thesis. He graduated in 2007 from Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg with a university degree in computer science (Diplom-Informatiker Univ.).

He worked as a research associate at the High Performance Computing group of the RWTH Aachen University's IT Center until 2011 and afterward at the Institute for Scientific Computing at Technische Universität Darmstadt. There he joined the Graduate School Computational Engineering and was awarded a doctorate degree in natural sciences from Technische Universität Darmstadt in 2015.

His research interests include parallel programming and high performance computing techniques with a focus on methods and mechanisms for understanding the runtime behavior of parallel applications and measurement techniques for resource utilization as well as strategies for productive computational science.