About

I'm Mike, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information, working with Kevyn Collins-Thompson. My favorite problems sit at the overlap of statistics, natural language processing, and education research: places where no single field has a clean answer. I build methods for analyzing human conversations at scale (data infrastructure, temporal and discourse features) and evaluation frameworks for the generative AI systems now embedded in those conversations.

I came to this work through an interdisciplinary path: a BS and MS in mathematics at Cal Poly, Peace Corps service in Botswana, and a PhD in math education at Michigan with Deborah Ball. Teaching has been a through-line: math and stats departments, advanced math camps, middle- and high-school enrichment. The unusual route is the point. My real expertise is interdisciplinary, and most of what I find interesting lives in the crevices between fields that don't usually talk to each other.

Day-to-day, what actually drives me is writing code to test an idea. I like staying close enough to the data to still tell what the numbers mean, and I like the moments when a method built for one field turns out to work cleanly in another. Most of what I do now uses statistics and machine learning, but I think of myself less as a statistician or ML researcher and more as someone who will pick up whatever tool the problem actually needs.

I live in San Luis Obispo with my wife and our goldendoodle. Outside of research I play guitar and ukulele, hike when I can, get into the occasional racket sport, and meet up with friends for board games and Super Smash Bros. Melee.

Get in touch

I take on a handful of consulting and research-collaboration projects each year. Best entry point is email: mikeion@umich.edu.