Thomas Wiegand (born 6 May 1970 in Wismar) is a German electrical engineer who substantially contributed to the creation of the H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and H.266/VVC video coding standards. For H.264/AVC, Wiegand was one of the chairmen of the Joint Video Team (JVT) standardization committee that created the standard and was the chief editor of the standard itself. He was also a very active technical contributor to the H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and H.266/VVC video coding standards. Wiegand also holds a chairmanship position in the ITU-T VCEG of ITU-T Study Group 16 and previously in ISO/IEC MPEG standardization organizations. In July 2006, the video coding work of the ITU-T jointly led by Gary J. Sullivan and Wiegand for the preceding six years was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history. Since 2018, Wiegand has served as chair of the ITU/WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health (FG-AI4H). Since 2014, Thomson Reuters named Wiegand in their list of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” as one of the most cited researchers in his field. Current work Wiegand is Professor at the Technical University of Berlin and executive director of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany. He heads research teams working on Video processing and coding Multimedia transmission Machine learning Mobile Communications (management) Computer Vision (management) Since 2020 he is a Principal Scientist at the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD). Early background Thomas Wiegand was born in and spent his early life in East Germany, where he decided to make an apprenticeship as an electrician instead of studying, because everyone who wanted to go to the university had to serve for three years in the National People's Army which he chose to avoid. After the "Wende" he started to study electrical engineering at the Technical University of Hamburg, where he earned his Diplom in 1995. In 2000 he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. 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. Standardization Since 2000: Associated Rapporteur of VCEG (Video Coding Experts Group - ITU-T SG16 Q.6) Since 2001: Associated Rapporteur / Co-Chair of JVT Since 2002: Editor of the H.264/AVC video coding standard and its extensions (FRExt and SVC) 2005-2009: