Michael studied Linguistics, Philosophy and English Philology at the University of Düsseldorf (Heinrich-Heine-Universität). 1983 M.A. in Philosophy with a thesis on modal logic. 1989 Dr. phil. in Linguistics with a thesis on the semantics of tense, aspect and temporal connectives (published 1990 and reprinted 2013 as Zeitaspekte). From 1985 to 1993 research and teaching positions at the General Linguistics Department of the University of Düsseldorf and the Computer Science Department, Section Knowledge and Language Processing, University of Hamburg. Guest scientist at the Bielefeld University Center for Interdisciplinary Research and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Co-founder and co-chair 1990-1993 of the Hamburg Graduate Research Training Group on Cognitive Science. 1990 – 1995 chair of the Section of Computatinal Linguistics of the German Linguistic Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS).

In 1993 Michael joined the Scientific Center Heidelberg of IBM Germany as project lead of the Verbmobil project. Since then he has held different program lead and management positions at IBM's services division.

Since 1995 Michael teaches parttime as an Adjunct Lecturer (as of February 2019: Honorarprofessor) at the Institute for Computational Linguistics and since 2017 also at the Institute for German as a Foreign Language Philology of the University of Heidelberg (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität). His current teaching focuses on logic and semantics. Since 2015 Michael is also a member of the Heidelberg University Language and Cognition (HULC) Lab, as part of the research group Time and Space in Language and Cognition.