In 1944 Henley received a B.E.E. in electrical engineering from the City College of New York. From 1944 to 1946, he served in the U.S. Navy, decommissioning and repairing electrical equipment on ships and submarines. He worked at the Airborne Instruments Laboratory as an electrical engineer from 1946 to 1948. Between 1950 and 1951 he worked at Stanford University, and received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1952. From 1952 to 1954, he was a Jewett Fellow and lecturer at Columbia University. In 1954, Henley accepted a faculty position at the University of Washington where he remained for his entire career, serving as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences between 1979 and 1987.
Over the course of his research career, Henley studied symmetries in nuclear physics.[3] In 1976 Henley calculated with Lawrence Wilets the effects on parity non-conservation in atomic physics,[4] and later he calculated parity violating effects in the parton model with Stephen Ellis and David Callaway[5][6]
From 1979 to 1987 he was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences there and Director of the Institute for Theoretical Nuclear Physics in 1990-1991. He was Professor Emeritus since 1995.[7] He dedicated his retirement to teaching Physics at the University of Washington's Transition School and Early Entrance Program, the Robinson Center for Young Scholars.[8] In 2014 at the age of 90 Henley retired from this position.
^EM Henley; L Wilets (1976). "Parity non conservation in Bi and Tl atoms". Phys. Rev. A. 14: 1411–1414. doi:10.1103/physreva.14.1411.
^Callaway, D. J. E.; Ellis, S.D.; Henley, E.M.; Hwang, W.Y.P. (1980). "Parity and charge symmetry violations in high-energy lepton pair production with polarized hadrons". Nuclear Physics B. 171: 59–77. Bibcode:1980NuPhB.171...59C. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(80)90359-4.
