Michael Baer received the Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, CA, in 1997 and the M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 2000 and 2003, respectively.

During the course of pursuing his degrees, he spent three summers as an intern at Xerox PARC (now PARC, Inc.) and four summers and 16 months part-time as an intern with the Information Theory and Algorithms Group at HP Labs.  From 2003 to 2005, he was a Research Scientist with UtopiaCompression, Los Angeles, CA.  From 2005 to 2007, he was a Scientist at Electronics for Imaging, Foster City, CA.  Since 2008, he has been with VMware, Inc., San Francisco, CA.  His research interests include source coding trees; optimizing prefix codes for nontraditional objectives; and image, video, and data signal processing for compression and other applications.