Michael is the president and co-founder of Commonweal. His current initiatives at Commonweal are Omega, the Omega Resilience Awards, the Cancer Help Program, Healing Circles Global, CancerChoices, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and The New School at Commonweal. He is also president of the Jenifer Altman Foundation and a principal co-founder of the Health and Environmental Funders Network. He did his undergraduate work at Harvard and his doctoral work in psychology and politics at Yale before teaching at Yale in the early 1970s. He co-founded Commonweal in Bolinas, California in 1976. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for contributions to public health in 1984 and is the author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Therapies (MIT Press) and numerous other publications.