He received his PhD from Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble and Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw where his advisors were Laurent Manivel and Jaroslaw Wisniewski. After completing his doctoral work, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute, Centre de Recerca Matematica, and Freie Universität, and a Leibniz Fellow at Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach. His research interests include algebra, combinatorics and algebraic geometry. Michalek is particularly interested in toric varieties.