Prof. Dr. Michael Waidner

Michael Waidner is the Founding Director (CEO) of the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE. He has been the Director of Fraunhofer SIT and a Professor of Computer Science at Technische Universität Darmstadt since the end of 2010, and since 2016 a Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

From mid-1994 until the end of 2010, Michael Waidner held various technical and executive positions at IBM Corporation, initially at IBM Research in Rüschlikon, Switzerland, and subsequently at IBM's headquarters in New York. Until his move to Darmstadt, he was an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technology Officer for Cybersecurity, chair of the IBM Security Architecture Board and responsible for the company's technical strategy in cybersecurity. He was also an elected member of the IBM Academy of Technology.

Michael Waidner is an inventor of 25 patents and an author of over 160 articles in scientific conferences and journals. He also regularly writes articles for a broader audience, e.g., for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung FAZ and for Tagesspiegel Background. Since the beginning of 2024, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, one of the leading journals in the field of cybersecurity.

He is a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering acatech, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE, a Distinguished Scientist of the Association for Computing Machinery ACM, and a member of various advisory boards for industry and government.