Prof. Michaels was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up in Ashland, Kentucky. She graduated from Georgia Tech in 1976 with a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering, and then joined the Hanford Engineering Development Laboratory in Richland, Washington, where she first began developing systems and methods for ultrasonic evaluation. This work led to her graduate studies in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell University, where she earned the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1982 and 1984, and spent a year as an IBM Postdoctoral Fellow. From 1985 until joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 2002, she worked in industry, first as co-founder of a startup company, and later as Manager of Systems Development at Panametrics, Inc., a world leader in the development and manufacture of automated ultrasonic inspection systems.

Prof. Michaels’ industrial and research career has primarily been focused in the general area of ultrasonic wave propagation as applied to nondestructive evaluation and structural health monitoring. She has made major contributions related to ultrasonic sparse guided wave arrays, wavefield imaging, in situ monitoring of structures, signal processing and imaging methods, and automated inspection systems. She regularly consults for industry on projects related to ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation and automated systems.