Mladen Victor Wickerhauser was born in Zagreb, SR Croatia, in 1959. He is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology and Yale University.
He is currently a professor of Mathematics[1] and of Biomedical Engineering[2] at Washington University in St. Louis. He has six U.S. patents and more than 100 publications. One of these, "Entropy-based Algorithms for Best Basis Selection," led to the Wavelet Scalar Quantization (WSQ) image compression algorithm, used by the FBI to encode fingerprint images.
Wickerhauser has been a member of the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and has received the 2002 Wavelet Pioneer Award from SPIE (The International Society for Optical Engineering).
He is of Austrian descent.