Huisgen-Zimmerman was born in Germany. Her father was the chemistry professor Rolf Huisgen. She received her Ph.D. from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1974 under the supervision of Friedrich Kasch.^[2] Huisgen-Zimmerman received her habilitation from Technical University of Munich in 1979, and stayed on the faculty at the Technical University of Munich until 1981. She became a researcher at the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, a faculty member at the University of Iowa, and a professor with a personal chair at the University of Passau, before moving to Santa Barbara in 1987.^[1]

In 2012, Huisgen-Zimmerman became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[3]

• Zimmermann-Huisgen, Birge: Pure submodules of direct products of free modules. Math. Ann. 224 (1976), no. 3, 233–245.
• Zimmermann-Huisgen, Birge; Zimmermann, Wolfgang: On the sparsity of representations of rings of pure global dimension zero. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 320 (1990), no. 2, 695–711.
• Zimmermann-Huisgen, Birge: Homological domino effects and the first finitistic dimension conjecture. Invent. Math. 108 (1992), no. 2, 369–383.
• Eklof, Paul C.; Huisgen-Zimmermann, Birge; Shelah, Saharon: Torsion modules, lattices and P-points. Bull. London Math. Soc. 29 (1997), no. 5, 547–555.
• Huisgen-Zimmermann, Birge: Purity, algebraic compactness, direct sum decompositions, and representation type. Infinite length modules (Bielefeld, 1998), 331–367, Trends Math., Birkhäuser, Basel, 2000.