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Michael Backes is a full professor and has the chair of information
security and privacy at Saarland University. He is the director of
the newly established Center for IT-Security, Privacy, and
Accountability (CISPA), he is a Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for
Software Systems (MPI-SWS), and he is a principal investigator and
vicecoordinator of the Saarbruecken Cluster of Excellence on
Multimodal Computing and Interaction.

Backes has made pioneering contributions in various foundational and
applied aspects of IT-security and privacy, which resulted in more
than 130 publications. He has been granted several awards for his
work, most notably the MIT TR35 Award (35 best researchers in the
world under the age of 35, across all research disciplines), the ERC
Starting Grant, a Fellowship of the Max Planck Society, an IBM Faculty
Award, the Microsoft Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy
Enhancing Technologies, and the IBM Outstanding Achievement Award. He
was featured as the leading German researcher under the age of 40 by the
German edition of the Financial Times in 2010, and amongst the most
important IT people in Germany in 2010 and 2011 by the Computerwoche
newspaper.