Mike was born in England and migrated with his family to Australia in 1976. He went to school in Perth and undertook both his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at UWA, graduating with a BSc(Hons) in Botany and Zoology in 1992 and in 2001 a PhD, his thesis titled "The short-term impacts of logging on the jarrah forest avifauna".

Mike worked as a Rainforest Ecology faculty at the Centre for Rainforest Studies in the Wet Tropics of Queensland for 2 and a 1/2 years, before returning to Perth and working as an environmental consultant for 3 years, then returning to research at Murdoch University in 2005. Mike is still based at Murdoch University and is an adjunct staff at UWA when his current project moved to become based at UWA.

Mike is primarily interested in understanding human impacts on ecosystems and how we might ameliorate or reverse those impacts. His particular focus is on understanding the role that restoration might play in reducing human impacts on faunal communities and developing techniques to increase and accelerate faunal return to restored sites.