Michael Backes

Michael Backes (born 7 January 1978) is a German professor of computer science. He is the founding director and CEO of the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. He is known for his work on formal methods, cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies.

Life and career Born in Germany, he received a diploma degree in computer science and a diploma degree in mathematics from Saarland University in 2001 and 2002, respectively, and obtained his PhD in computer science from Saarland University in 2002 under the supervision of Birgit Pfitzmann and Harald Ganzinger.

He was successively a researcher at IBM Research (2002 – 2005) and associate professor (2005) and professor (2006 – today) of computer science at Saarland University, Germany.

He is the founding director and CEO of the newly funded CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany, since 2018.

His research is concerned with information security and privacy, particularly on security and privacy in machine learning, trustworthy information processing and medical privacy; design, analysis and verification for security-critical systems and services, and universal solutions in software and network security.

On June 22, 2026, he was suspended from his role as director of CISPA under suspicion of espionage and an external review is set to follow.

Awards and honors Backes has received a number of awards, including the following: 2004: Caspar Bowden Award 2004 2005: IBM Outstanding Achievement Award 2007: Fellow of the Max Planck Society 2008: IBM Faculty Award 2008: MIT TR35 2009: European Research Council Starting Grant 2014: European Research Council Synergy Grant 2015: Member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering 2017: CNIL-INRIA Privacy Award 2017: NSA Cybersecurity Research Award 2018: Fellow of the IEEE 2018: Honorary Doctorate degree of the University of Lorraine 2023: ACM Fellow