Mike was born in Tampa and enlisted in the Army infantry out of high school, which is not the usual first step toward a career in structural biology. He spent five years on active duty, including a year deployed to Afghanistan, before returning to Tampa for undergrad and ROTC at the University of Tampa. After graduating, he commissioned as an officer in the Chemical Corps and continued serving in the Army Reserve through graduate school before eventually retiring from the military. He now invokes his "retired" status whenever someone asks him to do something he would rather not do.
At UTampa, Mike joined Eric Werner's lab and spent two years designing ligands to recover rare earth metals from acidic nuclear waste solutions. He was apparently relentless about it: four coauthored papers resulted from his efforts, which Eric tells us is a university record. He also ran after-hours chemistry and calculus tutoring for his fellow ROTC cadets, the beginning of what turned into a long commitment to teaching.
Mike came to Cornell in 2018 and joined Nozomi Ando's group, where he studied allostery in E. coli aspartate transcarbamoylase (ATCase), the textbook allosteric enzyme. Mike and fellow graduate student Rob Miller combined crystallography, SAXS, and cryo-EM to tackle questions about ATCase regulation that remained unanswered after nearly 70 years of research on the enzyme. Much of that work brought Mike to CHESS: 14 SAXS beamtimes at 7A and another 7 crystallography beamtimes at 7B2. So, he has already spent a good deal of his life in our hutches, just from the other side of the beamtime request. The work was published in Nature Communications this year and earned him the 2026 CHESS Student Research Paper Prize.
Beginning in 2025, Mike was a Lecturer in Chemistry & Chemical Biology at Cornell, teaching General Chemistry II and directing laboratory courses serving roughly 700 students and 20 graduate TAs each semester. He loved teaching, but after giving his prize talk at this year's CHESS Users Meeting, he realized how much he missed making new knowledge. And here we are.
Mike lives in Ithaca with his wife, Alyssa; their two kids, Zandt and Fiona; and Jinx, a large dog often described as a "big dumb baby." Outside of work, he spends a lot of time with his family, walks Jinx around East Hill, listens to an unreasonable amount of music, plays bass, and reads. He is also prone to falling enthusiastically into rabbit holes, scientific or otherwise.
Scientifically, Mike is interested in going beyond static structures to understand protein dynamics and conformational ensembles. He's particularly interested in room-temperature and time-resolved crystallography, diffuse scattering, and high-pressure experiments, and integrating MX and SAXS to answer bigger scientific questions. Having spent years as a CHESS user himself, he is excited to now be on the other side of the experiment, helping users get the most out of their time at CHESS.
We're excited to have Mike on board at MacCHESS. Thanks for joining me in welcoming him to the team.