Dr Michael Backes is Associate Professor, Head of the Namibian H.E.S.S. group and Astrophysics Research in general and of the Virtual Institute for Scientific Computing and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Namibia, as well as Extraordinary Associate Professor at North-West University (South Africa).
Among his awards, he got elected a member of the Global Young Academy (GYA), a Fellow of the GSO Leadership Academy (both in 2018) and got invited to the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting in 2019 as Heraeus Fellow. He received the University of Namibia Meritorious Award 2017 for Best Academic Performance in the Faculty of Science, and the GfKl Application Award 2012 by the German Data Science Society (GfKl).
He is an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford and recently held an Africa Oxford Initiative (AfOx) Travel Grant, and was Namibian-PI on the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) project Namibian participation in the H.E.S.S. observatory 2019-2021 (PI G. Cotter). Currently, and is Co-Investigator of the recently awarded ERC Synergy grant "Blackholistic" (PIs: H. Falcke, S. Markoff, R. Fender).
He serves as Vice-Chairman of the Namibia Scientific Society since 2015, and as elected Executive Committee Member of the Global Young Academy since 2021. Further, he serves as voting member on the Steering Committees of H.E.S.S. and of the International Astronomical Union's Southern African Regional Office of Astronomy for Development.
During his post-graduate studies at TU Dortmund University in Germany, Prof. Backes spent study visits at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, in 2005 and the University of Birmingham, UK, in 2006, to attend Astrophysics classes. He conducted the Research for his Diplom thesis (MSc; 2008) and his Dr. rer. nat. (PhD; 2012) in the Astroparticle Physics group at TU Dortmund University. There he held the positions of a Graduate Teaching Assistant (2006-2008), Research Assistant (2008-2010) and, later, as Research Associate (2012-2013). Prof. Backes' PhD thesis focused on the investigation of emission properties of a specific Active Galactic Nucleus, employing gamma-ray and multi-wavelength observations. Meanwhile, he was an active member of the FACT and MAGIC collaborations. The FACT collaboration successfully set up the world's first Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope (IACT) utilizing a camera based on semi-conductor light sensors, dubbed G-APDs. The MAGIC collaboration operated a twin-system of the (then) world's largest IACTs. Additionally, he was strongly engaged in the Collaborative Research Center SFB 876, an interdisciplinary research centre on data analysis. In that context, he worked with statisticians and computer scientists on both, periodicity detection in unevenly sampled data and on an optimal signal/background separation for gamma-ray astronomy. In 2013, he joined the University of Namibia as Lecturer and conducts research in gamma-ray astronomy with H.E.S.S., the world-leading IACT system, and the planning of the next generation IACT project, the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). In 2015, he got appointed as the group leader of the Namibian H.E.S.S. group and became Co-PI of the Africa Millimetre Telescope. Since accelerated promotion in 2016, Dr Backes was employed as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physics at the University of Namibia. In 2017, Dr Backes got appointed as Extraordinary Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Space Research, North-West University (South Africa). In 2018, he got elected a member of the Global Young Academy (GYA). He held an Africa Oxford Initiative (AfOx) Travel Grant and was Namibian-PI on the Oxford-UNAM Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) project "Namibian participation in the H.E.S.S. observatory 2019-2021". Since 2020, he is also the founding head of the Virtual Institute for Scientific Computing and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Namibia and in 2021 he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.