Thomas Ertl received a MSc in computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Tuebingen. Since 1999 he is a full professor of computer science at the University of Stuttgart in the Visualization and Interactive Systems Institute (VIS) and co-director of the Visualization Research Center of the University of Stuttgart (VISUS). Prior to that he was a professor of computer graphics and visualization at the University of Erlangen and a cofounder and member of the board of science+computing ag, a Tuebingen based IT company. His research interests include visualization, computer graphics and human computer interaction in general with a focus on volume rendering, flow and particle visualization, parallel and hardware accelerated graphics, large datasets and interactive steering, visual analytics of text collections and social media, user interfaces and navigation systems for the blind. Thomas Ertl is coauthor of more than 500 scientific publications and he served as a reviewer for most of the conferences and journals in the field. He has been a member of numerous program committees (e.g. Eurographics, ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE VIS) and a papers co-chair for several conferences (e.g. Eurographics, IEEE Visualization, EuroVIS, PacificVis). From 2007-2010, Thomas Ertl was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics (TVCG) and he received the Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee in 2006. In 2007 he was elected as a Member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He received Honorary Doctorates from the Vienna University of Technology in 2011 and from the University of Magdeburg in 2014. Thomas Ertl is Eurographics member since 1994 and a Eurographics Fellow since 2008. Since 2004, he is elected member of the Executive Committee and in 2011/2012 he served as Chairman of the Eurographics Association. He received the Association's Outstanding Technical Contribution Award in 2006 and the Distinguished Career Award in 2016.