Thomas Wiegand is a professor at the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Berlin Institute of Technology, chairing the Image Communication Laboratory, and is jointly heading the Image Processing department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications - 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. He joined the Heinrich Hertz Institute in 2000 as the head of the Image Communication group in the Image Processing department. His research interests include video processing and coding, multimedia transmission, as well as computer vision and graphics

From 1993 to 1994, he was a Visiting Researcher at Kobe University, Japan. In 1995, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA. From 1997 to 1998, he was a Visiting Researcher at Stanford University, USA and served as a consultant to 8x8, Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA. From 2006-2008, he was a consultant to Stream Processors, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA. From 2007-2009, he was a consultant to Skyfire, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA. Since 2006, he has been a member of the technical advisory board of Vidyo, Inc., Hackensack, NJ, USA. He is currently a visiting professor at Stanford University, USA.

Since 1995, he has been an active participant in standardization for multimedia with successful submissions to ITU-T VCEG, ISO/IEC MPEG, 3GPP, DVB, and IETF. In October 2000, he was appointed as the Associated Rapporteur of ITU-T VCEG. In December 2001, he was appointed as the Associated Rapporteur / Co-Chair of the JVT. In February 2002, he was appointed as the Editor of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard and its extensions (FRExt and SVC). From 2005-2009, he was Co-Chair of MPEG Video.

In 1998, he received the SPIE VCIP Best Student Paper Award. In 2004, he received the Fraunhofer Award and the ITG Award of the German Society for Information Technology. The projects that he co-chaired for development of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard have been recognized by the 2008 ATAS Primetime Emmy Engineering Award and a pair of NATAS Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards. In 2009, he received the Innovations Award of the Vodafone Foundation, the EURASIP Group Technical Achievement Award, and the Best Paper Award of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. In 2010, he received the Eduard Rhein Technology Award. In 2011, he received the Best Paper Award of EURASIP, the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award and was elected Fellow of the IEEE. He is a recipient of the 2012 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Technical Field Award.

He was a Guest Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology for its Special Issue on the H.264/AVC Video Coding Standard in July 2003, its Special Issue on Scalable Video Coding-Standardization and Beyond in September 2007, and its Special Section on the Joint Call for Proposals on High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standardization. Since January 2006, he has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.