Mark grew up in Warrenville, Illinois and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received a B.S. in Chemistry with honors (2012) and performed undergraduate research with Prof. Gregory S. Girolami. He then attended graduate school at the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a PhD. in Inorganic Chemistry under the advisement of Prof. Jonas C. Peters (2018). Mark moved on to a postdoctoral position at the University of California, Davis in the lab of Prof. R. David Britt and was awarded a NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellowship to support his research (2018-2021). After a brief stint teaching general chemistry as an adjunct faculty member at the University of California, San Diego (2022), Mark joined the Chemistry faculty at the University of Nevada Reno as an assistant professor in 2023.