George Michail was born in 1968 in Athens, Greece. He was an honors student and entered the Physics Department of the University of Athens in 1986. As a Research Assistant at the High Energy Physics Laboratory at the University of Athens he worked on the design of the underwater neutrino detector NESTOR focusing on the feasibility of detecting neutrinos from supernovae. He was a recipient of the Fellowship of the National Fellowship Foundation of Greece for the academic years 1987-88 and 1988-89. He was accepted in 1991 in the Ph.D. program at the Physics Department of Harvard University. He worked as a Research Assistant at the Atomic and Low Energy Physics Lab at Harvard on the design of a dilution refrigerator used for low energy particle experiments in Penning traps. In 1992 he joined the High Energy Physics Laboratory at Harvard and worked on the Collider Detector at Fermilab. He proposed and developed muon triggers with high efficiency for top, bottom and electroweak physics . He was interested in heavy flavor physics and CP violation in the B-meson system and for his Ph.D thesis he worked on a measurement of the Time Dependent Mixing Parameter of B0-B0bar Mesons in proton-antiproton collisions.
George Michail in 1993 served as a president of the Harvard Hellenic Society, an organization representing student, research fellows and faculty of Greek origin at Harvard. During his term the organization flourished with new activities and visits of prominent politicians and scientists. In 1994 he received his Masters degree from Harvard and moved to Chicago to complete his Ph.D. work.
Just before finishing his thesis, in October of 1996 George Michail died in Chicago from injuries sustained in a head-on car crash with a drunk driver. He was 28.