Hermann Brand was born in Mauthausen, Austria, in 1955. He studied electrical engineering at the Technische Universität Graz, where he received the degree of Diplomingenieur in 1982. He then joined Siemens AG in Vienna as a research engineer. In 1989 he entered the doctoral program at the Institute for Microelectronics at the Technische Universität Wien as an external student, which he completed in 1994.