Michael Franz is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on just-in-time compilation and optimisation[2] and on artificial software diversity.

After completing military service in Germany, Franz moved to Switzerland to begin studies of computer science at ETH Zurich, finishing his Diplom-Ingenieur degree in 1989.

[16] Following two further years at ETH Zurich as a Senior Research Associate and lecturer, he joined the University of California, Irvine as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in January 1996.

[5][6][4] Franz's doctoral dissertation, entitled "Code Generation On-The-Fly: A Key To Portable Software"[17] proposed to make software portable among different target computer architectures by way of using on-the-fly compilation at load time from a semantic dictionary encoding, a compressed intermediate data structure.

[20] This project has attracted attention beyond academia, with coverage in the popular press ranging from as far as The Economist[3] to Wired Magazine.