STEM Faculty

Professional biography

Michel's broad area of teaching and research is programming and software engineering.

In 2024/25 he was an academic lead for generative AI in learning, teaching and assessment for the university. In 2012/13 he was the Head of the Computing Department, and the Deputy Head of the Computing and Communications Department in 2013/14. During 2017-19 he was the deputy lead of the largest theme of the £40m Institute of Coding (IoC) and the School of Computing and Communications lead for the IoC. From 2006 to 2016, he was an Associate Lecturer (tutor) on the MSc Project. 

Being fluent in German, he was an academic reviewer of the Technology Faculty of Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg on behalf of OU Validation Services. He was also academic reviewer for Ada, the National College for Digital Skills.

Before joining the OU, he was an assistant professor in the Computing Department of the New University of Lisbon, and a consultant to a software house, both in Portugal.

Research interests

Michel's research draws on a variety of techniques (repository mining, natural language analysis, information retrieval) to improve the understanding and practice of software evolution and maintenance and of the architectural design of software systems. Michel is also interested in data visualisation. He has proposed a novel application of concept lattices to visualise hierarchical socio-technical relationships, and developed an interactive scatterplot tool for easier exploration of data sets by non-specialists.​

He is part of the Software Engineering and Design group and in particular a PI of the EPSRC project Socio-technical resilience in software development and PI of the Huawei-funded project Empirical Data-Driven Bug Localisation in Software Development. He was a member of the £16m smart city MK:Smart project, which included the Urban Data School, a data literacy project in schools using smart city data.

He co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and supervised 7 PhD students to conclusion.

Teaching interests

Michel's teaching is centred on algorithms and programming. In particular he

• co-designed and wrote the text of a free interactive activity explaining what algorithms are, used by an educational publisher in a Computing A-level worksheet;
• consulted for a BBC 4 programme (and corresponding iWonder guide) on algorithms, which was nominated for a Learning On Screen award;
• co-authored a free pack of leaflets on coding, algorithms, and the history of computing, which is now available as a digital file (the 13,000 print copies have been distributed);
• wrote a free online 'hour of code' activity to introduce programming and reported on his experience of using a web-based IDE;
• was the main author of the Learn to Code for Data Analysis MOOC, now available (without discussion forum) on OpenLearn, and reported on the pedagogical approach taken;
• was the production chair of the new edition of Algorithms, Data Structures and Computability;
• authored two Python programming units for Introduction to Computing and IT 2 and reported on the pattern-oriented approach he developed;
• was a member of the Open Networking Lab development team.