Thomas Wiegand is a professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin and is jointly heading the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in 1995 and the Dr.-Ing. degree from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, in 2000.

As a student, he was a Visiting Researcher at Kobe University, Japan, the University of California at Santa Barbara and Stanford University, USA, where he also returned as a visiting professor. He was a consultant to a number of start-up companies.

Since 1995, he has been an active participant in standardization for multimedia with many successful submissions to ITU-T and ISO/IEC. For his research, he received numerous awards and multiple best paper awards for his publications. Since 2014, Thomson Reuters named him in their list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” as one of the most cited researchers in his field. He has been elected IEEE Fellow, to the German National Academy of Engineering (Acatech) and the National Academy of Science (Leopoldina).

Since 2018, he has been appointed the chair of the ITU/WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health.