Michael got his degree in Biology and Sport Sciences in Mainz, Germany, where he also had first contact with cryo-EM. In 2013 he finished his doctoral thesis in the group of Prof. Juergen Markl, primarily working on single particle analysis of arthropod hemocyanins and spending long nights aligning and manually collecting on microscopes. He went on to a post-doctoral period in Prof. Stefan Raunser's group at the MPI of Molecular Physiology, Dortmund, Germany, working on muscle and kinetochore proteins. He joined Astex Pharmaceuticals in 2017 to help set up cryo-EM as a drug discovery technology and is now in charge of development and automation of the Astex cryo-EM software framework.