Wolfgang Ellermeier majored in psychology at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Subsequently he started his doctoral studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he learned the ropes in the psychoacoustics laboratory of David S. Emmerich and received his Ph.D. degree in experimental psychology in 1988. He spent his post-doctoral years back in Germany, at the University of Regensburg, where he completed his ‘Habilitation’ (a postdoctoral lecture qualification) on auditory profile analysis in 1995.

In 2001 he was appointed to head an interdisciplinary research program investigating basic issues of sound quality assessment and sound design at Aalborg University in Northern Denmark. This ‘Sound Quality Research Unit’ was co-sponsored by leading Danish acoustics companies/agencies such as Bang & Olufsen, Brüel & Kjær, and Delta. Between 2001 and 2006 it produced a sizeable number of publications, patents, and most importantly, young researchers trained both in the engineering and psychoacoustics aspects of hearing science.

In 2007, Wolfgang Ellermeier became a professor of ‘applied cognitive psychology’ at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. His principal research interests are psychoacoustics, psychophysical methodology, and mathematical psychology.