Michael received his B.S. from the University of Florida, where he worked at the Florida Museum of Natural History and the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera Research. While there he counted and collected butterflies in the field at sites that ranged from the Rocky Mountains to the cloud forests of Costa Rica. To begin to understand the molecular origins of the diversity he encountered in the field he shifted his focus to developmental biology and gene regulation during his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley under the mentorship of Mike Levine and Nipam Patel. He was able to combine his diverse interests in evolution and developmental biology as a postdoctoral fellow with Claude Desplan at New York University. Michael established his lab at the University of California San Diego in 2019 and is interested in the evolution and development of the nervous system and brain, and his lab uses the insect visual system as a model.
