Michael received his PhD from Queen Mary, University of London in 2002 under the supervision of Peter Cameron. He has been employed at UWA since 2002 where he has held various positions including an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship and an Australian Research Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. He was promoted to Professor in February 2018.

Michael is a Fellow of the Australian Mathematical Society and a Fellow of the Institute for Combinatorics and it Applications.

Michael's research interests lie in the area of permutation groups and their action on various combinatorial structures. This has had three main themes: the study of theoretical properties of permutation groups, analysing graphs with a high degree of symmetry, and the study of symmetry properties of geometries.

He is the leader of the Centre for the Mathematics of Symmetry and Computation.

He is always willing to supervise PhD projects, honours projects and any other undergraduate research projects. 

Michael teaches a wide variety of units, from first year calculus and linear algebra to third and fourth year specialist units in algebra and combinatorics. 

Michael is currently the Head of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He is also a member of the University's Education Committee and the University's Academic Workload Advisory Commitee. 

Michael is an editor of the Journal of Group Theory and an associate editor of the Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.

Michael is currently the chair of the Organising Committee of the Simon Marais Mathematics Competition and was the chair of the Western Australia Junior Mathematical Olympiad from 2016-2021.