Talent Magnet

Perhaps the strongest measure of this impact is what happened to the people themselves.

Today, 31 former members of Michael Backes’s own research group have gone on to faculty or professorial positions at recognized universities and research institutions around the world.

They include researchers who later joined institutions such as Purdue University, University of Waterloo, RWTH Aachen, TU Vienna, University of Amsterdam, University of Birmingham, University of Lausanne, Zhejiang University, IMDEA and CISPA itself.

He built an academic school that has produced a new generation of scientific leaders in cybersecurity.

This is more than successful supervision.

It is the multiplication of scientific leadership.

At the same time, Backes became one of the driving forces behind an unusually ambitious international faculty recruitment effort.

At CISPA, he helped attract more than 50 international faculty in one of the world’s most competitive scientific labor markets. Many joined at formative stages of their careers while having opportunities at other leading academic institutions.

Attracting such people requires much more than competitive compensation.

Exceptional scientists choose environments.

• They choose ambition.
• They choose intellectual freedom.
• They choose colleagues.
• They choose the possibility of building something that does not yet exist.
• And they choose leaders whom they believe can create that environment.

Backes’s approach to talent therefore extended far beyond individual recruitment.

He repeatedly helped create new structures when existing ones were insufficient.

In 2014, he founded a dedicated Bachelor’s program in Cybersecurity at Saarland University, combining cybersecurity with a rigorous computer-science education from the first semester.

He subsequently established an internationally oriented Master’s program in Security & Privacy, which later evolved into a permanent Master’s program in Cybersecurity.

He also co-created a dedicated Master’s program in Entrepreneurial Cybersecurity, combining advanced cybersecurity education with entrepreneurship and venture creation.

Beyond formal degree programs, major scientific initiatives that Backes initiated or helped build — including CISPA, a DFG Collaborative Research Center, two Clusters of Excellence and major ERC-funded research programs — created funded research and training opportunities for hundreds of young scientists.

The scale therefore reaches far beyond the members of one research group.

It represents a sustained effort to build an entire talent architecture around cybersecurity and computer science: identifying exceptional potential, developing it, attracting it internationally and creating institutions in which it can flourish.