Michael is the CSIRO-UWA Chair of Complex Engineering Systems and a former Future Fellow at UWA. He is the Deputy Editor of Chaos and the Main Editor of Physica A. His research interests are in the areas on nonlinear dynamics and complex systems – with a particular emphasis on techniques to extract model structure from observed data. Currently this includes applications as diverse as mental health and mining, and his work informed the Australian response to COVID in remote communities. He has been a proponent of methods to construct network structures from time series such that the networks represent a coarse graining of the underlying dynamics. This has culminated in ordinal network approaches which provide robust data driven methods to estimate approximate symbolic dynamics for continuous dynamical systems from time series data