Michael McDonald is from Kingston, Ontario in Canada. He graduated from Queen's University in Canada in 2005 with a Bachelors degree in Physics and in 2007 with a Masters of Science under the supervision of Prof. Stephane Courteau. He received a PhD from the University of Maryland in 2011, after working with Prof. Sylvain Veilleux on an emission-line study of giant elliptical galaxies. In 2012, Michael was named a Hubble postdoctoral Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As of July 1, 2015, Michael joins the faculty of the MIT Department of Physics as an Assistant Professor.