Lothar Thiele received his Diplom-Ingenieur and Dr.-Ing. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich in 1981 and 1985 respectively. After completing his Habilitation thesis from the Institute of Network Theory and Circuit Design of the Technical University Munich, he joined the Information Systems Laboratory at Stanford University in 1987.
In 1988, he took up the chair of microelectronics at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Saarland, Saarbrucken, Germany. He joined ETH Zurich, Switzerland, as a full Professor of Computer Engineering, in 1994.
His research interests include models, methods and software tools for the design of real-time embedded systems, internet of things, cyberphysical systems, sensor networks, embedded software and bioinspired optimization techniques.
Lothar Thiele was and partly is still associate editor of INTEGRATION - the VLSI Journal, Journal of Signal Processing Systems, IEEE Transaction on Industrial Informatics, Journal of Systems Architecture, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Journal of Real-Time Systems, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, ACM Transactions on Cyberphysical Systems, and ACM Transaction on Internet of Things.
In 1986 he received the "Dissertation Award" of the Technical University of Munich, in 1987, the "Outstanding Young Author Award" of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, in 1988, the Browder J. Thompson Memorial Award of the IEEE, and in 2000-2001, the "IBM Faculty Partnership Award". In 2004, he joined the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2005, he was the recipient of the Honorary Blaise Pascal Chair of University Leiden, The Netherlands. Since 2009 he is a member of the Foundation Board of Hasler Foundation, Switzerland. Since 2010, he is a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2013, he joined the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation SNF. Lothar Thiele received the "EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award" in 2015. Since 2017, Lothar Thiele is Associate Vice President of ETH for Digital Transformation. In 2019, he joined the Foundation Board of Technopark Zurich as president. Lothar Thiele has been elected IFIP Fellow by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) as part of its first cohort of fellows in 2020. In 2021, he received the IEEE TCRTS Achievement and Leadership Award. In 2022 he received the "Test-of-Time-Awards" at SenSys and EMSOFT for the contributions on "Low-Power Wireless Bus" and "Real-Time Interfaces for Composing Real-Time Systems". Since 2023, Lothar Thiele is Chair of the Executive Board of the SCION Association.