Michael received his Bachelor’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering from UC Berkeley. After receiving a Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study, he earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993.

He has since been employed as a computational physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, working at the laboratory’s National Ignition Facility on its Inertial Confinement Fusion device. Dr. Marinak is the principal author on a number of articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and co-author on many more.