He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2012. Michael published more than 20 research papers on information retrieval with verbose natural language queries. His paper "Discovering Key Concepts in Verbose Queries", published at SIGIR 2008, has been widely cited as one of the seminal works in this research area. Since then, his papers on query segmentation, query expansion and query representations for information retrieval appeared at top-tier academic conferences, including SIGIR, CIKM, WSDM, WWW, ACL and SIGKDD. Michael co-organized a successful series of workshops on "Query Representation and Understanding" held at SIGIR 2010 and 2011. He also served as a publicity chair for the WSDM 2014 conference.