Prof. Backofen studied computer science at the University of Erlangen, and received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Saarland in December 1994, where he worked at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). He received his habilitation from the University Munich (LMU) in February 2000. He was holding the chair for bioinformatics at the University of Jena from November 2001 till June 2005. After declining an offer for a full professorship at the University of Linz in 2004, became the holder of the chair for Bioinformatics at the University of Freiburg, Institute of Computer Science. His research interest include constraint programming, structure prediction in simplified protein models, investigation of protein energy landscapes, detection of RNA sequence/structure motifs, prediction and evaluation of alternative splice forms, description and detection of regulatory sequences. He is coauthor of the book "Computational Molecular Biology: An Introduction" (Wiley&Sons, Mathematical and Computational Biology Series, 2000).