Michael obtained his BSc and PhD from UNSW in 1983 and 1988. He was a Research Associate at Princeton University in 1988/9 and a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE) located at James Cook University from 1989-1991.

He started at CSU in January 1992 on the Wagga Wagga Campus in the School of Science and Technology, was a visiting Professor at the University of California, Davis in Jun-Dec 1995 (SSP), then moved to the Environment Studies Unit (ESU) in Bathurst in 2001. He was Acting Head of the ESU until it was closed down in 2002 and later in that year moved into the School of Information Technology. In 2007 the School merged with Accounting to form the School of Accounting and Computer Science. Michael was a visiting Fellow at the University of NSW from Jan-Jun 2009 (SSP). In July 2009, he moved into the newly formed cross campus School of Computing and Mathematics as Associate Head of School.  He later became Course Director for the BIT, BCompSc, Grad Cert/Dip Maths and Grad Cert Stats. He has had PhD students in various areas of interest including phenolics in olives, games technology, spiking Neural Networks, radar image analysis, robotics, manifolds in computer vision, and analysing EEG signals.  He has also brought in over $2.4M in industry research grants and has published over 70 papers.

Michael began flying in 2005, obtained his Private Pilots Licence in 2007 and began Aerobatics in 2016.  He now regularly participates in State and National Aerobatic Competitions.