Michael Thielscher is an ARC Future Fellow and a Professor at The University of New South Wales since 2010. Before that he was Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department at Dresden University of Technology in Germany since 1997. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Darmstadt University in 1992, and his Habilitation in Computer Science in 1995. He has been a guest researcher at Imperial College in London, the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, the New University of Lisbon, the University of Toronto, and the University of Western Sydney.

Michael Thielscher's current research is mainly in Knowledge Representation, Cognitive Agents and Robots, General Game Playing, and Constraint Logic Programming. He has published over 80 refereed papers and four books. In 1998, his Habilitation thesis was honoured with the award for research excellence by the alumni of Darmstadt University, and he has co-authored the award-winning system FLUXPLAYER, which in 2006 was crowned the World Champion at the AAAI General Game Playing Competition.