Michael Craddock was born in the United Kingdom. He received his bachelor's, masters and Ph.D. from Oxford in mathematics, physics, and nuclear physics. Before coming to UBC's Physics department, he was also a scientific officer at Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory.
Once at UBC, Craddock was pivotal in the department's work to build a new accelerator at the UBC Campus – exploring many options, recommending designs, and managing the specifications. This work resulted in the 1968 federal approval of TRIUMF (TRI-University Meson Facility). TRIUMF is a consortium, now featuring 20 member universities, initially started by Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria. Its original aim was to conduct research not possible by a single university in nuclear physics. TRIUMF is located at the south campus of UBC in Vancouver.
For the first ten years, Craddock was TRIUMF's beam-dynamics group leader. He was at TRIUMF for 50 years and spent 33 years as TRIUMF's head accelerator physicist, with various titles, before retiring in 2001. During that time, he was the chief architect for TRIUMF's attempt to build the Kaon Factory project through acquiring federal funding for a suite of synchrotron-type proton accelerators. In addition, Craddock worked on projects related to the Large Hadron Collider accelerator injector chain at CERN. He supervised many graduate students throughout his career, taught undergraduate and graduate courses, and was TRIUMF's Correspondent for the CERN Courier.
After retirement, he joined the Accelerator Development group at TRIUMF. He worked on fixed-field alternating gradient accelerators (FFAGS) from 2004-2012, remaining a constant presence at the lab, organizing conferences, presenting introductory accelerator physics lectures, workshops and acting as TRIUMF's historian. At the end of his life, he also made a financial gift to TRIUMF, establishing the Michael Craddock Fund for Accelerator students.