Born Michael Sean Brotherton in Granite City, Illinois, he grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where he graduated from the John Burroughs School in 1986.
He then headed south for college, attending Rice University, from where he graduated magna cum laude in 1990 with a BS in electrical engineering.
From 1996 to 1999 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working primarily with Wil van Breguel and Robert Becker on the Very Large Array's FIRST survey related projects.
From 1999-2002, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and FUSE Science Team Associate working with Richard Green in Tucson, Arizona.
He works both on large samples that enable the phenomenology to be explored for an entire active galactic nuclei population, as well as individual objects of special interest that may reveal important physics because of their extreme nature.