Prof. Dr. Michael Waidner is the head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology in Darmstadt and the CEO of the National Research Centre for Applied Cyber­security ATHENE. He is also a professor of information security in the department of computer science at Darmstadt Technical University. He also holds a visiting professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Previously, he was Chief Technology Officer for Security at IBM and Chairman of the IBM Security Architecture Board in New York. From 1994 to 2006, he led IT security and data protection research at IBM Research – Zurich, and was one of the initiators of the Zurich Information Security Center at ETH Zurich.

He received his diploma in 1986 and his doctorate in Computer Science in 1991, both from the University of Karlsruhe. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He has been a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) since 2021.