Michael Gekhtman earned his Ph.D. in 1990 at the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine under supervision of Prof. Yu. M. Berezanskii.
Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Notre Dame in 1998, he held postdoctoral positions at the Weizmann Institute, University of Michigan and the College of William and Mary. In 2007 he became a full professor at Notre Dame where he also served as a department chair from 2013 to 2016. Over the years Gekhtman held visiting research professorships at the Max-Planck-Institut-Bonn, IHES, MSRI , RIMS, Institute Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton Institute, CRM and University of Heidelberg.
He published more than 70 papers on integrable systems, orthogonal polynomial and , more recently, on the theory and applications of cluster algebras and, in particular, their interactions with Poisson geometry.​