Reiner S. Thomä, received the Dipl.-Ing. (MSc), Dr.-Ing. (PhD) and the Dr.-Ing. habil. degrees, in electrical engineering (information technology) from Technische Hochschule Ilmenau, Germany, in 1975, 1983, and 1989, respectively.
From 1975 to 1988 he was a research assistant in the fields of electronic circuits, measurement engineering, and digital signal processing at the same university. His research topics where in surface acoustic waves filter design and FFT spectral analysis. From 1988 to 1990 he was a research associate at the Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR (Zentrum für Wissenschaftlichen Gerätebau). During this period he was working in the field of radio surveillance. In 1991 he spent a three month sabbatical at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Lehrstuhl für Nachrichtentechnik).
Since 1992 he has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering (Electronic Measurement) at Technische Universität Ilmenau (Ilmenau University of Technology) and from 1999 until 2005 he was the director of the Institute of Communication and Measurement at the same university.
