Kurtyka was educated at the Parisian École Polytechnique. He was also a scholar at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, America, studying quantum optics. At NIST he worked under William D. Phillips, a Nobel laureate in physics. During his studies he also specialized in economics, with particular focus on market organization, studying under Professor Jean Tirole, the 2014 Nobel laureate in economics. In the field of international economics, he studied at the University of Louvain La Neuve in Belgium, and later obtained a master's degree in the subject at the Warsaw School of Economics. He defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Warsaw. He was a lecturer in the field of economics, market organization, change management and industrial strategy at the University of Warsaw, the Collegium Civitas and the Oxford Programme On Modern Poland. He is the author of the book “From Restructuring to Modernisation. Delayed Transformation of the Polish Power Sector in 1990-2009.”, as well as the co-author of the concept of implementation of effective changes in an enterprise, described in the book “Change Management. From Strategy to Action”.

Internationally, Michał Kurtyka chaired the works of the IEA in 2016-2017 when the Agency delivered the “Long Term Financial Health” reform which assured its sustainable financial security. In April 2018 it was announced he would chair the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which was held in December 2018. The appointment of Kurtyka, as a relatively anonymous bureaucrat, marked a break from the diplomatic norms of previous climate change conferences, where more senior politicians have traditionally presided.The conference ended with the adoption of the Katowice Rulebook which enables the implementation of the Paris Agreement.