Adrien Michel was born and raised in Geneva. After attending public school, he joined the Faculty of Physics at the University of Geneva in 2007. He obtained a Master's degree in theoretical physics in 2012 after a master's thesis on the effect of gravitational lenses on measurements of the expansion rate of the universe.  He then joined the University of Bern for a second Master's degree in climate science at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research. He concluded this Master's degree in 2017 with a Master's thesis on modelling the age of ice at the bottom of the ice sheet. This work was awarded the de Quervain Prize of the Swiss Commission for Polar and Alpine Research of the Swiss Academy of Sciences.

In parallel to his Master's degree in Bern, Adrien worked for the Technical Support Unit of IPCC Working Group 1 during the Fifth Assessment Report. In 2017, he joined the Laboratory of Cryospheric Sciences at EPFL for a PhD whose objective was to assess the impact of climate change on river temperatures in Switzerland in the framework of the Hydro-Ch2018 project of the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment. He also worked on climate change scenarios temporal downscaling. This PhD was concluded in the summer of 2021 and Adrien is now a Postdoc at the SLF working on snow cover evolution in Switzerland during the last decades.