About
She wanted to know how things worked.
Everything that followed came out of that one habit: taking a thing apart to find out what was inside it.
Michelle's fascination with how things work started long before the PhD. She was the child who took things apart, learned with her hands, and didn't always thrive in a classroom built around sitting still and knowing the right answer. That left her with a belief she still holds: human potential is often hidden by the way we choose to measure it.
The curiosity led into engineering, and eventually a PhD in Biomedical and Materials Engineering. Engineering led into nanotechnology and the behaviour of things at scales most people never see. That work led, increasingly, towards robotics, AI and automation, and towards the machines that are now changing how work gets done.
Somewhere in there Michelle discovered that inventing technologies is only one part of progress. People also have to understand them. A material nobody can explain changes nothing. Neither does a system nobody trusts.
That turned into a career-long connection between engineering and communication: two television series, bestselling books, chart-topping podcasts, teaching, and more than four hundred and fifty keynotes spent translating sophisticated technology for the people who have to make decisions about it. She founded Matter Workshop to do that work with organisations directly, building on her years co-founding and running the science-education company Nanogirl.
And it led to the question underneath all of her work now: not simply what machines will be capable of, but what capabilities humans will need as a result.
Built in the real world
Michelle isn't observing technological change from the sidelines. A PhD engineer with more than two decades across advanced materials, nanotechnology, AI and robotics, she has built her career at the point where emerging technologies leave the laboratory and enter the real world, advising some of the world's largest technology companies along the way.
Her work in robotics and physical AI has put her inside one of the biggest shifts of our time: machines moving from processing information to seeing, learning and performing physical work. She understands the technology at an engineering level, and she has spent much of her career thinking about what happens to people when technology changes faster than they do.
Today she works at the intersection of what machines can do and what humans should do next. Not as a forecaster looking in from the outside, but as an engineer who has worked inside the technologies reshaping how we live and work.
The technology is never the point. What humans choose to do with it is.
Complex ideas. Made human.
Understanding complex technology is one thing. Making it matter to people is another.
Michelle has spent much of her career translating science and emerging technology for audiences far beyond the laboratory. She is a bestselling author, has created and presented television series, hosted podcasts and brought complex ideas to life for audiences around the world.
That ability to move between technical depth and human storytelling is also what defines her on stage. Whether she is speaking to engineers, executives, educators or thousands of people at a global conference, Michelle makes difficult ideas understandable without making them simplistic.
Recognition
- Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit For services to science communication
- Sir Peter Blake Leadership Award
- Prime Minister's Science Media Communication Prize
- Women of Influence Award Science and Innovation
- Hi-Tech Inspiring Individual of the Year
- New Zealand Association of Scientists Science Communicators Award