Evsey Galperin was born on 31 October 1920 in Uman (Ukraine, former USSR) as one of eight children in a Jewish family as the son of Anna Markovna and Joseph Iosifovich.

In 1941, Galperin joined the Red Army in World War II and fought with the Orenburg Cossack cavalry regiment at the south western and Bryansk front.

Galperin introduced the symmetric triaxial seismometer design,[2] which became widely used in exploration geophysics and seismology.

He also contributed significantly to the development of the Vertical Seismic Profiling (VSP) technique,[4] which found little application outside the Soviet union before mid-1970s but became a standard method in exploration seismology worldwide.

Evsey Galperin became ill during the 1990 annual convention of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) in San Francisco, California.