Michael Schrefl received his Dipl.-Ing. degree and his Doctorate from Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria, in 1983 and 1988, respectively. During 1983–1984 he studied at Vanderbilt University, USA, as a Fulbright scholar. From 1985 to 1992 he was with Vienna University of Technology. During 1987–1988, he was on leave at GMD IPSI, Darmstadt, where he worked on the integration of heterogeneous databases. He was appointed Professor of Business Informatics at Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria, in 1992, and Professor in Computer and Information Science at University of South Australia in 1998.

He currently leads the Department of Business Informatics - Data and Knowledge Engineering at University of Linz, with projects in business intelligence, semantic systems, and web engineering.

Dr. Schrefl is a member of ACM and IEEE Computer Society, and Kepler Society.