[2] Until January 2016, Fellows was professor at Charles Darwin University, Australia,[3] and Director of the Parameterized Complexity Research Unit (PCRU).
[4] He has taught in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, as well as in the UK and Europe; and has given invited talks around the world.
[5] Also in 2014, he was named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand[6] (the first computer scientist to receive this honor).
An avid interest in politics was inspired by his mother Betty, long a leader in the California League of Women Voters, and a love of literature and movies is shared with his son, Max.
Fellows wrote a series of passion plays about mathematics which were presented at the Victoria Fringe Festival and at NCTM at Asilimar in 1999.
Parameterized complexity has strong connections to algorithmic engineering, and is increasingly important in fields as diverse as Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Bioinformatics.
In 2018, he received the Norwegian Research Council Toppforsk Award for his project, Parameterized Complexity for Practical Computing.
He was presented with a Springer festschrift: The Multivariate Algorithmic Revolution and Beyond - Essays Dedicated Michael R. Fellows on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday.
Honorary Fellows include Einstein, Bohr, Curie, Darwin, Fleming, Priestley, Richter, Rutherford, altogether 230 since 1870.
The two papers and prize winners are: On problems without polynomial kernels, Hans Bodlaender, Rodney Downey, Michael Fellows, Danny Hermelin.
Infeasibility of instance compression and succinct PCPs for NP, Lance Fortnow, Rahul Santhanam, same journal 2011.
Mike's activities are about thinking outside the box, whether sharing the unknowns of computer science and mathematics with elementary school children or running a mathematics event in a park.” Mike has been an Australian professorial fellow at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and at Charles Darwin University, Australia.
[15] written with Tim Bell and Ian Witten, and This is MEGA-Mathematics!,[16] with Nancy Casey convey sophisticated concepts such as intractability, sorting networks, and cryptography.
was part of the famous British Faraday Christmas Lectures in 2008, which was given by Professor Christopher M. Bishop[17] of UK Microsoft Research.