Michelle has a degree in Maritime Studies, focusing on Naval Architecture and Hydrographic Surveying. She is highly experienced in ship stability issues, and has a strong track record in ship and cargo operations, having spent ten years in vessel and port operations, with the majority of this time as a vessel operations and cargo planner at P&O Nedlloyd. Subsequently she joined GN Comtext (MCTS) where she was the Cargo Systems Project Manager configuring, testing and installing container ship planning systems and ships load computers.

She joined MTD in 2001 to provide support in claims management and investigation across a broad range of marine incidents. To date she has been involved a wide variety of cases including collisions off China, steering gear failures in the black sea, bridge fires in Suez, and wind farm turbine movements in Scotland.