Michael is a Data Scientist, specialising in Computational Linguistics, whose research focuses on relationships and language use in social media communities and other social informatics. His recent work relates to Australian social media usage, and its relationship with experts, leaders and professionals. This is connected to his previous doctoral research on finding expertise within an online community through the recognition of the expertise claims and community opinion that make up the Duality of Expertise. His Expertise Finding Model profiles and ranks forum authors based on linguistic evidence from forum discussions.

His former role at Swinburne University and Deakin University as a Data Analysis Tools Developer (DATD) within the Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis (TrISMA) was to assist academics from all fields (but especially the humanities) include analysis of Australian social media usage in their research. He has also worked within ATAP and LDACA projects at the University of Queensland on tools and workshops using natural language processing (NLP) on textual archives. Prior to that he was an AI research assistant at Monash University and developed machine translation systems at Adacel technologies and Toggletext. 

In 2024, Michael was part of the teaching team for:

• FIT5086 Organisational Informatics
• FIT3179 Data Visualisation
• FIT5147 Data Exploration and Visualisation

Michael was previously the Deputy Course Director for the Bachelor of Applied Data Science (BADS) and Course Coordinator of the Data Science: Data Driven Decision-Making microcredential. Michael was part of the Monash Online Graduate Diploma in Data Science (GDDS) team and lectured:

• FIT5145 Introduction to Data Science
• FIT5146 Data Curation and Management
• FIT5196 Data Wrangling

Michael's research covers the broad fields of computational linguistics, social informatics, persona studies through user modelling.

His current research projects include:

• social media communication of minorities, looking at social media behaviour of ethnic or other communities when discussing issues of interest
• social media communication of political communities, studying how politicians and other political figureheads interact with online communities through social media
• experts and communities, examining social media communities and the behaviour of and towards significant figures within the community

He is interested in disabled communities and their use of ICT for communication.