Patrick Michaud

Dr. Patrick Michaud, FTC Program Co-Leader: Patrick has a PhD in Computer Science and has been programming professionally since the 1980s.  He worked for over two decades at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where he was a Professor and Principal Investigator or Co-PI on $25 million in research projects in data management, environmental monitoring, workforce development, and geospatial systems.  He is the creator of PmWiki™, a wiki-based content management system, and for a decade he served as the international Lead Developer for Perl 6 / Raku (a well-known open-source programming language).  In 2011 Patrick began coaching in FIRST LEGO League, which quickly grew to include active participation in FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST Robotics Competition as a volunteer and mentor.  In 2013 he began offering robotics courses and workshops for coaches and teachers in FLL and FTC.  He subsequently joined the University of Texas at Dallas as Assistant Director of its Science and Engineering Education Center and as the Affiliate Partner for FIRST Tech Challenge in North Texas, overseeing its expansion from 126 to over 205 teams by 2020.  Patrick continues his consulting activities in software development, robotics, and educational workshops for FIRST coaches and teams in Texas and on the internet. 

Patrick is the author of Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches, which was one of the first “viral” web pages in 1994 and is published in the 1999 German edition of the Best of Annals of Improbable Research .   His FIRST Tech Challenge team 7172 Technical Difficulties is ranked 3rd on the 2025 FTCStats Hall of Fame and has earned advancements to the FTC World Championship eight times since the team's founding in 2013.