After growing up in Hell Hole Swamp in the South Carolina low-country, Michael entered Clemson University in 1965 and gained three degrees in chemical engineering, the final PhD degree in 1974. He began working for Westvaco’s chemical division in Charleston SC and spent his entire 34+ years at that location in process and product development with natural products based on lignin, rosin, and fatty acids. He worked as Research Engineer, Research Group Leader, New Business Development Manager, and finally as Idea Hunter-Gatherer in their External Technologies group. He participated in numerous commercially-successful projects such as retrofitting their tall oil refineries in Charleston SC and DeRidder LA, accelerating the development of their asphalt chemicals area in which today MeadWestvaco is a leader in “cold paving” technology using aqueous asphalt emulsions, commercializing two world-leader products for decorative laminates, and the vetting of new business start-ups. In early 2009, Michael took early retirement and started TechLake & Associates, LLC that began as a consulting business but quickly developed into generating intellectual property aimed at commercializing new businesses based on natural products, especially lignin. He won a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant from the DOE late in 2009 and is developing a radically-new process: “Sequential Liquid-Lignin Recovery & Purification” (SLRP). SLRP targets recovering pure lignin from the black liquor of pulp and paper process or from the crude lignin streams exiting all enzymatic biomass conversion processes. SLRP lignin can be used first as a biofuel and then as a green-chemical component for high-value applications such as phenolic resins and polyurethanes.