Faculty

Research interests and background: In 2019, Mark started as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences at the University of British Columbia and an Investigator with the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, and was promoted to Associate Professor (with tenure) in 2024. His research interests are in applying technological, computational, and mathematical approaches to understand healthy brain function, especially learning and memory, as well as brain changes that emerge in disorder and disease. He has received a variety of recognitions for his research, including being named a Next Generation Leader by the Allen Institute, a Future Leader of Canadian Brain Research by the Brain Canada Foundation, a Scholar with Michael Smith Health Research British Columbia, an Alzheimer’s Young Investigator by the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada, the Krieg Cortical Scholar in the 2020 worldwide competition, and the New Investigator Award from the Canadian Association for Neuroscience in the 2025 national competition.

Mark received his BSc in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia (2007), where he conducted research examining complex oscillatory behaviour of a sixth-order nonlinear partial differential equation. He later received his MS (2008) and PhD (2011) in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University, where he combined computational modeling and patch-clamp electrophysiology to study retinal processing as a joint student between William Kath, Hermann Riecke, and Joshua Singer. As a postdoc, Mark worked in the laboratory of Nelson Spruston at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research combined computational modeling, big data analysis, transcriptomics, electrophysiology, viral circuit mapping, and animal behaviour to study the role of cell types in memory.