Thomas Zemen was born in Mödling, Austria. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree (with distinction) in electrical engineering from Vienna University of Technology in 1998 and the doctoral degree (with distinction) in 2004.

He joined Siemens Austria in 1998 where he worked as hardware engineer and project manager for the radio communication devices department. He engaged in the development of a vehicular GSM telephone system for a German car manufacturer.

Since October 2003 Thomas Zemen has been with the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna. His research interests include orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), multi-user detection, time-variant channel estimation, iterative MIMO receiver structures, cooperative communication systems, software defined radio concepts, vehicle-to-vehicle channel measurements and modelling.

Since 2008 Thomas Zemen leads the research area "Signal and Information Processing". He manages the project "Cooperative Communications for Traffic Telematics" which is funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds, WWTF). He is the speaker of the national research network for "Signal and Information Processing in Science and Engineering" funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Dr. Zemen teaches "Cooperative Communications" as external lecturer at Vienna University of Technology.