Serge Michailof had an exceptional career as a development practitioner, successively preparing development projects in Latin America, South Asia, and North Africa in an engineering firm, managing technical teams in Africa and Asia for the French Development Agency (AFD) as country director and later as the head of operations, negotiating development programmes and policy reforms at the World Bank as a senior advisor and regional director. For ten years, he was an associate professor at the Paris School of International Affairs (Sciences Po) in Paris and the Sorbonne.

He is currently an associate researcher at IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques), the leading think tank on geopolitics in Paris, and a senior fellow at the FERDI foundation (Fondation pour les Etudes et la Recherche en Développement International). He is a board member of the CIAN (Conseil des Investisseurs Français en Afrique) and the GRET (Groupe de Recherche et d'Echanges Technologiques), one of the leading French NGOs. He is a regular consultant on fragile states and post-conflict reconstruction, working for governments and international agencies, with a specific focus on institution- and state-building. During his 50-year carrier he has worked in 65 different countries on all continents.

Serge Michailof studied in France (MBA at HEC, PhD in Economics, MA in Anthropology) and in the US (MIT).