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. == Awards and honors ==