Mike grew up in the Seattle area before beginning undergraduate study in 1999 at the University of Washington, where he later graduated with BSc's in biochemistry and economics. As a 19 year-old freshman, Mike began analyzing data from the initial draft Human Genome, spending several years doing research in gene finding and protein structure prediction. He continued studying protein structure as a graduate student at UCLA, but returned to genomics in 2005 when he moved to the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. While at Sanger, Mike completed his PhD with Prof Leena Peltonen and Prof Gert-Jan van Ommen and was heavily involved in the first wave of genome-wide association studies, especially the statistical methods thereof. He also led large-scale studies to integrate multi-omic data, and identified a gene co-expression network related to the innate immune response and associated with diverse metabolic traits.