About the Speaker:

Mark was born and raised in Cleveland, OH. In 2012, he earned a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY, conducting undergraduate research with Professor Alison J. Frontier on an oxidative variant of the Nazarov cyclization. Through participation in the DAAD RISE program, Mark also spent the summer of 2010 conducting research with Henning Hopf at TU Braunschweig on the synthesis of strained hydrocarbons. After graduation, he joined the laboratory of Professor F. Dean Toste at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he studied the chemistry of the Au(I)/Au(III) redox couple in several contexts, including supramolecular catalysis and fluorine-18 radiosynthesis. After earning his Ph.D. in 2017, Mark joined the laboratory of Professor Eric N. Jacobsen as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University where his research focused on enantioselective fluorination reactions with chiral organoiodane catalysts. In 2019, Mark joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of chemistry and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2022. His research interests include the development of synthetic methodology and study of their mechanisms, with a specific focus on “single-atom skeletal editing”.