Michael is a 2015 Team Award Recipient for the President’s Blue and Gold Award of Excellence, in the design, development and implementation of the Master of Digital Media program. He helped design and implement Ryerson’s Zone Learning as well as providing support and mentorship to the DMZ. Michael is formally the Director of Industry for the Master’s in Digital Media program and comes to Creative Industries as a specialist in the field of creative business production and operational management.

Michael has spent his professional career immersed in the creative, technical, and business roles of animation production, maintaining a successful 20-year career in the film and television business as a producer, executive producer, and executive.

Michael’s main research is on the use of Virtual Archaeology to better inform archaeological, heritage and community engagement research, knowledge translation, dissemination and mobilization. His particular area of interest is in the public engagement of Virtual and Augmented Reality production, 3D Scanning and VR technology. Recently Michael completed a research project to (re)imagination a 16th century Iroquoian Longhouse from the Lawson Site, which is now being deployed as an interactive experience at the Museum of Ontario Archaeology, with further research focusing on the deployment of robots within archaeological sites in Egypt and the VR revisualization of the Temple at el-Hibeh.

Michael's current research is focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Culture, both from the perspective of the enculturation of data and in the formation of pre-cultural markers within AI itself. Additional research is in the DNA of 3D points within virtual objects and the representation of providence and provenance data as an actor-network.