Thomas Bäck - Biography#

Thomas Bäck received the Diploma degree in Computer Science in 1990 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1994, both from the University of Dortmund, Germany. He is Professor of Computer Science with the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, Netherlands. His research interests include evolutionary computation, machine learning, and their real-world applications, especially in sustainable smart industry and health.

In 2021, Dr. Bäck has been elected as member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and as IEEE Fellow. He was a recipient of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award in 2015, was elected as Fellow of the International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation in 2003, and received the best Ph.D. thesis award from the German society of Computer Science (GI) in 1995.

Thomas Bäck has graduated 22 PhD students under his supervision and currently supervises 14. He has also supervised 62 MSc students during his academic career. Since 2017, he is Vice Scientific Director of the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS). He has been Director of Education at LIACS from 2007 - 2016. Since 2014, he also serves as a member of the "Permanent Committee for Academic Practice" at The Faculty of Science, Leiden University.

He has been teaching various BSc and MSc courses continuously since 1996, including Evolutionary Algorithms, Natural Computing, Swarm-Based Computation, Systems Development and Project Management, and served as a student advisor for the ICT in Business MSc education from 2008 - 2013.

He has an H-Index of 62, with a total of 38,500 citations (November 2021).

More information can be found in his ORCID and Google scholar profiles, see:

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6768-1478
https://scholar.google.de/citations?hl=de&user=x7LEID0AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate