Before coming to Google, he was a student at MIT, where his master's thesis, End-User Programming for the Web, won the William A. Martin Memorial Thesis Prize in computer science. The thesis introduces an extension to JavaScript called Chickenscratch that is designed to enable end-user programmers to script web pages. The language and development environment are bundled as a Firefox extension called Chickenfoot that has similarities to Greasemonkey. Michael holds master's and bachelor's degrees in computer science from MIT.