Michaël Gillon began his higher education at the age of twenty-four, after seven years of service in the Belgian army.

"I finished high school at the age of seventeen, and I didn't feel ready - or motivated - to undertake [higher] education," he says.

In March 2006, he defended his PhD thesis on the improvement of the photometry of exoplanet transits in the framework of the CoRoT project.

He initiated an international research observing for the first time the thermal emission of a super-Earth: 55 Cancri e. In 2013, he was appointed member of the CHEOPS scientific team.

On February 22, 2017, NASA officially announced the discovery of seven exoplanets by an international team of astronomers, led by Michaël Gillon.