Mike earned his Ph.D. at LPL in 1997 with a dissertation titled, A Spectrophotometric Survey of Comets and Earth-Approaching Asteroids. He moved on to work at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as a postdoctoral research associate and then as research scientist from 1998 until 2022. His research specialty was the physical properties of comets and asteroids. He served on the science teams of the DART Project, the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) Project, the Dawn Mission, and the NASA Deep Space 1 Mission. He was the author of over 80 peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Read the complete memorial from the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences.