Christian Theobalt is a Professor of Computer Science and the head of the research group "Graphics, Vision, & Video" at the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany. He is also a Professor of Computer Science at Saarland University, Germany. From 2007 until 2009 he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, his Diplom (MS) degree in Computer Science from Saarland University, and his PhD (Dr.-Ing.) from the Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics.

In his research he looks at algorithmic problems that lie at the intersection of Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and machine learning, such as: static and dynamic 3D scene reconstruction, marker-less motion and performance capture, virtual and augmented reality, computer animation, appearance and reflectance modelling, intrinsic video and inverse rendering, machine learning for graphics and vision, new sensors for 3D acquisition, advanced video processing, as well as image- and physically-based rendering. He is also interested in using reconstruction techniques for human computer interaction.

For his work, he received several awards, including the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max-Planck Society in 2007, the EUROGRAPHICS Young Researcher Award in 2009, the German Pattern Recognition Award 2012, and the Karl Heinz Beckurts Award in 2017.
He received two ERC grants, an ERC Starting Grant in 2013 and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2017. In 2015, he was elected as one of the top 40 innovation leaders under 40 in Germany by the business magazine Capital. Christian Theobalt is also a co-founder of an award-winning spin-off company from his group - www.thecaptury.com - that is commercializing one of the most advanced solutions for marker-less motion capture.