Mark was born in the city of
Mannheim,
Baden, 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. Mark's father,
Herman Francis Mark, a prominent polymer chemist, secured a position with a Canadian paper company and left before the family could accompany him. Finally, in late 1939, his family joined him in
Hawkesbury, Ontario. About a year later the family moved to the United States, settling in the
Flatbush section of
Brooklyn, New York after the elder Mark accepted a professorship at the
Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. After becoming an American citizen in 1945, he graduated from
New York's selective
Stuyvesant High School in 1947. He went on to receive a
bachelor's degree in
physics from the
University of California, Berkeley (where he was a member of
Sigma Pi fraternity) in 1951. He then earned a
Ph.D. in physics from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954. After receiving 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, California. 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 also taught undergraduate and
graduate courses in physics, engineering and management at
Boston University, the
University of California, Davis and
Stanford University. ==U.S. government==