Official Story
Michael did his undergraduate studies at the University of the Philippines, graduating with a degree in Chemistry in 1985. He moved to the United States, earning an M.A. in Chemistry at Columbia, and then a Ph.D. in Botany with a minor in Global Policy at the University of Georgia in 1993 at the laboratory of Susan Wessler. He was awarded an Alfred Sloan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Molecular Evolution, which he used to further his postdoctoral training at the University of California in San Diego. In 1996, he joined the faculty of Genetics at North Carolina State University, where he obtained tenure in 2001 and was named William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor in Genetics in 2005. In 2006, he moved to the NYU Center for Genomics and Systems Biology (CGSB) as the Dorothy Schiff Professor of Genomics. He was director of CGSB from 2010-2012, and in 2012 was named Dean for Science of the Faculty of Arts and Science. In 2015 he was named as a Silver Professor at NYU. Michael has won numerous awards, including being named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2005 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2006. In 2016, he was named a Global Chair Professor at the University of Bath in the UK. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Molecular Biology and Evolution, Genome Biology and Evolution, and Trends in Plant Sciences. He is also a Trustee of the Alfred Sloan Foundation, and was a past member of the Council of Scientists of the Human Frontiers Science Program and the Biological Sciences Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation.
Unofficial Story
Michael had an early interest in both science and journalism, so he studied chemistry in college but pursued journalism on the side as an editor of the college newspaper and as a freelancer. He is most proud of his coverage of the aftermath of the 1983 assassination of Sen. Benigno Aquino, which eventually led to the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. In 1984 he was asked to join the Associated Press Manila Bureau as a full-time reporter, but turned it down to continue his college studies in chemistry. He graduated with a B.S. in chemistry with a B/B- average. His low grades did not prevent him from moving to Columbia University in 1985 to pursue a Ph.D. in Chemistry. Although he wrote a first-author paper in Science, passed all the exams and was "all but dissertation", he realized early on he was not that interested in chemistry. He decided instead to leave it all behind and move to a Ph.D. program in plant genetics and molecular biology based almost solely on an interview he read in Omni magazine. Accepted to Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, he nevertheless chose to move to the University of Georgia (UGA) to work specifically for a young assistant professor named Sue Wessler. He had a rocky 5 years as a Ph.D. student, joining a botany graduate program when the only thing he really knew about plants was they had chlorophyll, and hampered with mediocre bench skills. The only saving grace he had was being a voracious reader about everything in biology, and an ability to see connections between very different areas in science. During his stay at UGA, at the age of 28, he finally realized he was most passionately interested in evolution, and so wrote his dissertation on the evolution of transposable elements in 1993. Winning one of 5 slots for a Sloan fellowship in molecular evolution, he went to the University of California in San Diego to work on the then new and exciting area of evolution of development in plants. His two-year postdoc was unproductive on paper (he wrote only 1 research article), but was important as he used the time to ponder his future in scientific research. Michael hit the faculty job market in 1994/1995 because his visa was running out, and got 3 interviews. He only got one offer, at a salary that was 20% lower than his peers, a start-up package of $50,000 and a windowless laboratory space and office that could fit maybe 4 people. He nevertheless benefited from joining a department that was a world leader in quantitative and population genetics, and this helped solidify the course of his research program. Although his first 2 grants proposals were declined (at which point he thought his career was over), he managed the next year to get 3 small grants which he nursed for the next few years to establish the foundation of his work in plant evolutionary genetics. Those early years as a faculty member proved to be the most intellectually important years in his career, where he integrated the study of functional and evolutionary genetics and helped establish the modern study of plant evolutionary genetics. In 1999, while still an assistant professor, he became PI of a multimillion-dollar inter-institutional grant, and since then, he has largely been funded by large collaborative grants. He was recruited to NYU in 2006, the result of a fluke that came about because the NYU biology chair sat next to his Ph.D. adviser at a talk he was giving in the National Academy of Science. Michael has managed to lead a vigorous research program for 21 years, but nevertheless he still occasionally wakes up from a dream that he never submitted his undergraduate thesis and so did not actually get a B.S. degree.