Ilse Helbrecht was born Stuttgart in 1964. In 1983, she graduated from High School in Osnabrück. She studied geography, sociology as well as spatial planning and administrative law at the University of Munster. She received her Ph.D. (1983) and her postdoctoral qualification (Dr. phil. habil., 1999) from the Technical University of Munich.  From 1994 to 1996, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver/Canada. In 2002, she assumed a full professorship in human geography at the University of Bremen, where she subsequently also served as adjunct dean and vice rector. In 2009 she was appointed by Humboldt-Universität Berlin as professor for cultural and social geography. She also serves as the Director of the Georg Simmel-Centre for Metropolitan Studies (GSZ) at Humboldt-University Berlin. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Caroline von Humboldt Chair as part of the German higher education Excellence Initiative.