Sybille Hinze studied management of science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Leningrad State University (now St. Petersburg, Russia). From 1990 to 1997, she worked as a research fellow at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (Karlsruhe, Germany) and received her doctorate from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University (the Netherlands) in 1997. After completing her doctorate, Sybille Hinze spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University, Research School for Social Sciences and then returned to the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research where she was deputy head of the Competence Center Policy and Regions and head of the Evaluation and Policy Business Unit.

From 2005 to 2006, she was seconded to the European Commission, Directorate General for Research, Unit for Planning, Programming, and Evaluation. From August 2008 to December 2015, Sybille Hinze was deputy head of the Institute for Research Information and Quality Assurance (iFQ) and, since the merger of the iFQ and the German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) in January 2016, deputy head of the Research System and Science Dynamics Department in Berlin.

In July 2020, Sybille Hinze assumed leadership of the newly founded Center for Open and Responsible Research (CORe) (Objective 3: Advancing Research Quality and Value) of the Berlin University Alliance.

Sybille Hinze was chair of the consortium “Competence Centre for Bibliometrics” until July 2020, and a member of the COST Scientific Committee until February 2022. She is member of the Steering Committee for the European Summer School for Scientometrics (esss), and part of the editorial board of the journal “Science and Public Policy”. Since 2013, she holds the position as secretary at ENID (European Network of Indicator Designers).