Michael started working on his Ph.D. in 2010. His many accomplishments at UCSD include building a hydroponic garden in his grad student office and successfully recovering data from supposedly-erased SSDs (leading to widely-cited paper). He also spent several summers as an intern at MSR and later VMWare research labs.
As a grad student, he designed and architected the Corfu database, which runs the control plane of VMWare’s NSX, the industry’s most popular network virtualization platform. Lately, he’s been advising VMWare product groups and working on VMware’s blockchain product, which is due to replace the CHESS settlement system on the Australian Stock Exchange. In his spare time wins best paper awards (e.g. USENIX ATC 2018 and EuroSys 2020).
