Michael Sommerauer studied human medicine at RWTH Aachen University and completed his doctorate in biochemistry. From 2009 to 2016, he underwent further neurological training at the University Hospital Zurich, where he also acquired the additional qualification of "somnologist". As part of a postdoctoral fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation, he completed a research stay at the PET Center at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark (supervisors: David Brooks & Per Borghammer). From 2017 to 2024, he worked at the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital of Cologne, where he habilitated on the topic of "Sleep-wake disorders in Parkinson's disease" and, funded by an Else-Kröner Excellence Scholarship, set up his own research group on the early detection of Parkinson's disease. Since May 2024, he has been a senior physician and head of the neurological sleep laboratory at the Center for Neurology at the University Hospital Bonn.

His research group focuses in particular on isolated REM sleep behavior disorder as an early symptom of Parkinson's disease. To this end, he recruited a local cohort of over 125 people with this sleep disorder who are being observed longitudinally. Another focus of his work is multimodal imaging using PET and MRI to detect changes in brain function in Parkinson's disease.