"A person with a maths background can adapt to a vast number of professions."

Now a Senior Reservoir Engineer with BHP, Michael has spent time on oil rigs as a petroleum engineer and has studied and researched in Australia and the United States. He studied maths for the diversity of fields he could enter.

Michael has a maths degree with Honours in Chaos Theory from Melbourne University and also a doctorate in Applied Mathematics from CalTech in the United States and spent 2 years in New York researching fluid flow.

He returned to Australia and started work as a research scientist for BHP, shifting towards engineering in 1993.