Thomas Martinetz (born 2 January 1962 in Nettesheim) is a German physicist and neuro-informatician.
Thomas Martinetz studied mathematics and physics at the Technical University of Munich, where he earned his doctorate in theoretical biophysics under Klaus Schulten in 1992 after several years as a guest at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
[1] After working in the central research and development department of Siemens AG, in 1996 he moved to a professorship at the Institute for Neuroinformatics of the Ruhr University Bochum and took over the management of the Center for Neuroinformatics GmbH.
In 1999 he accepted a call to the University of Lübeck as director of the Institute for Neuro- and Bioinformatics.
His major contribution in the field of neuroinformatics is the so-called Neural gas, a variant of self-organizing maps.