Mark studied Chemical Physics as an undergraduate at the University of Bristol, followed by a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor David Klenerman. He was awarded the 2002 Gregorio Weber International Prize in Biological Fluorescence for this work.

Mark then spent 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, working with Professor Richard Zare. He returned to the U.K. in 2002 to undertake a second postdoctoral position at the National Institute for Medical Research with Dr Justin Molloy, before moving to Oxford in 2005 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. He was subsequently appointed as a University lecturer and fellow of Wadham college in 2006. He joined King’s in 2016 as part of its expansion of Chemistry.

In 2009 Mark was appointed to the steering committee of the British Biophysical Society. Patents arising from his work have also been licensed in the U.K. Mark has also been active in raising awareness of his group’s research beyond the lab, including video podcasting and participation in the 2014 “I’m a scientist get me out of here” competition. He was awarded the RSC Norman Heatley Award in 2015 in recognition of his work. He was made a Fellow of the RSC in the same year.

Research Interests

We build artificial mimics of cell membranes; both to improve our understanding of membrane biology, and to engineer new devices inspired by biology.Our approach is to dismantle the membrane into its component parts, and then rebuild it from scratch to understand what’s going on. We do this using a range of optical techniques capable of watching individual molecules.