Hans Mark - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Mark was born in Mannheim, Germany. He lived in Vienna for a time before escaping the Nazi anschluss via Switzerland. Before the collapse of France the Mark family moved to London where they lived during the Battle of Britain and the bombing of London. Mark's father, Herman Francis Mark, a polymer chemist, soon took a position with a Canadian paper company, moving his family to Toronto. A short time later the family moved to the United States in 1940. After becoming an American citizen in 1945, he graduated from New York's Stuyvesant High School in 1947 and went on to receive a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1951 and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1954.

After completion of his doctorate, Mark stayed on at MIT as a research associate and acting head of the Neutron Physics Group Laboratory for Nuclear Science. He returned to UC Berkeley in 1955 and remained there until 1958 as a research physicist at the University's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore. Dr. Mark then returned to MIT as an assistant professor of physics. In 1960, he again returned to the University of California's Livermore Radiation Laboratory's Experimental Physics Division. He remained there until 1964, when he became chairman of the university's Department of Nuclear Engineering and administrator of the Berkeley Research Reactor.

Mark has also taught undergraduate and graduate courses in physics and engineering at Boston University and the University of California, Davis.