BSc, Dip Tchg, Business Studies, M.Prof. Studies Data Science

Position

Teaching areas

Michael teaches data analytics on the degree, graduate diploma, and postgraduate certificate, diploma and masters programmes. Michael also supervises students completing their major industry-based project at the end of their qualifications.

Contact details

Biography

With a career in industry spanning 23+ years, two countries, and various industries, Michael is well able to relate his current teaching to almost every corner of business.

From starting as an Industrial Engineer, Michael moved into statistics while helping Vehicle Assemblers New Zealand towards the much-coveted Ford Q1 award.

During 3 years self-employed he gravitated from the doing to the teaching, and in 1998 he fulfilled his father’s often repeated prophecy he should be a ‘teacher’, and joined MIT full time. The philosophy that is at the core of his teaching has two major strands: Firstly, that each person is worthy of respect and love, and secondly, that the only ‘silly’ question is the one you didn’t ask.

Why I love MIT

I work with real people, who have had real experiences, and who have a sincere desire to see our students succeed. Brilliant!

Sometimes ‘teaching’ can be a bit of a slog, but when we see students that we have taught graduate, and get great jobs, and move up in their careers, we celebrate with them, and it’s all worthwhile. Great!

Research interests

Michael provides help to his colleagues on their research, and would love to investigate the benefits of using virtual reality to extend the number of dimensions we can usefully display when analysing datasets with high dimensionality (many variables), and how to do the story-telling using holographic projection. If you have a spare $100,000 to help with this topic, please send it.