Thomas Bäck is full professor of computer science at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, The Netherlands, since 2004. He received his PhD in Computer Science (under supervision of Hans-Paul Schwefel) from Dortmund University, Germany, in 1994, and then worked for the Informatik Centrum Dortmund (ICD) as department leader of the Center for Applied Systems Analysis. From 2000 - 2009, Thomas was President of NuTech Solutions GmbH and CTO of NuTech Solutions, Inc. In 2009, he founded divis intelligent solutions GmbH. The company provides data mining and optimization software and services to customers such as BMW, Daimler, Ford, Honda, and many others. Thomas Bäck has more than 200 publications as well as a book on evolutionary algorithms, entitled Evolutionary Algorithms: Theory and Practice, and is co-editor of the Handbook of Evolutionary Computation and the Handbook of Natural Computing, and co-author of the book Contemporary Evolution Strategies (Springer, 2013). He is editorial board member of a number of journals and has served as program chair for major conferences in evolutionary computation. He received the best dissertation award from the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) in 1995 and is an elected fellow of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation for his contributions to the field.