Michael Casey is a senior advisor at the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT’s Media Lab and a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. A writer, researcher, and public speaker in the fields of economics, finance, and digital-currency technology, he previously spent 18 years as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. This February, he will publish his fifth book, The Truth Machine (co-authored with Paul Vigna), about bitcoin and blockchain technology. He is a graduate of the University of Western Australia, Curtin University, and Cornell University.

A forth-generation Irish Australian born in Perth, Michael traces his ancestors, who emigrated during the Great Hunger, to counties Tyrone and Kerry. “The Irish are people of passion – song, poetry, and drama – but also hard work, with an ethos of struggle and determination, along with an well-formed understanding of the destructive impact of oppression,” he says. “I felt there was more Irishness than Englishness in Australia’s culture and I tended to identify with it more than the English roots of my mother’s family.”

He and his wife, Alicia, live in Massachusetts with their daughters Zoe and Analia.