Michael Gertz is a full professor at Heidelberg University where he heads the Database Systems Research Group at the faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. He received his diploma in Computer Science from the TU Dortmund University, and his Dr. rer. nat. from the Leibniz University of Hannover in 1996. From 1997 until 2008 he was a faculty at Department of Computer Science at the University of California at Davis. His interdisciplinary research interests include text analytics, natural language processing, and machine learning, with applications in the medical sciences, law,  political sciences, and economics.