Prof. Brandenburg became known on a global level through his major contribution to the groundbreaking development of MP3, the standard coding format for digital audio at the time. Besides audio coding, he has been a high-profile expert in other areas of research as well, such as audio quality assessment, wave field synthesis, psychoacoustics, or audio/video analysis. As Prof. Brandenburg will not retire from his professional career, Fraunhofer IDMT and executive director Prof. Dr.-Ing. Udo Bechtloff are happy to know him standing by their side and giving valuable advice.

As a lecturer at TU Ilmenau, Prof. Brandenburg will continue with his research and teaching activities until March 31^st, 2020. "Giving up the position of director of the institute, I will now have more time to take care of doctoral candidates. And there are still a number of research projects going on I am involved in, and project proposals that need to be written. I still have lots of ideas and projects in my mind, like spinning off another company. So there is plenty to do", Prof. Brandenburg said. The Fraunhofer executive board will officially bid farewell to Karlheinz Brandenburg during a colloquium scheduled for the end of the year.