Following an early career in industry Mike Gregory was the founder member of the team which established the IfM in 1998. Linking science, engineering, management and policy and integrating education, research and practice the IfM now has over 250 staff and research students and a further 100 undergraduate and Masters students. He retired as Head of the Manufacturing and Management Division of the University of Cambridge's Department of Engineering and of the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) in 2015.

Mike Gregory's work is closely linked with industry and government and he has published in the areas of manufacturing strategy, technology management, international manufacturing and manufacturing policy. External activities have included membership of various government and institutional committees.

He served as Executive Director of the Cambridge MIT Institute from 2005-2008, Springer Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 2008/9, and held senior roles at the Institute for Continuing Education (ICE) and Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) in Cambridge and externally as a member of the Supervisory Board of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVMC) and President of the Cambridge Society for the Application of Research (CSAR).

He chairs the Babbage International Policy Forum and is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, where he is President of the SCR. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, where he has been a Trustee.