She is head of the Science Policy Programme at EMBO (Heidelberg, Germany). Her major areas of policy research are biotechnology, responsible conduct of research, and scientific publishing. Previously she was a policy analyst at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Her research there focused on identifying emerging societal concerns associated with new discoveries in genomics, particularly synthetic biology. She was a research fellow at the Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Columbia University, and earlier was a research associate at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Michele holds a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Washington, an A.B. from the University of California (Berkeley), and an M. A. in Science, Technology, and Public Policy from the George Washington University. She is an elected Fellow of the AAAS.