Mark has a B.Sc.(Hons) in Genetics from the University of Alberta, and a Ph.D. in Botany from the University of British Columbia. He spent four years at the Max Planck Institut für Züchtungsforschung in Köln, Germany, pursuing studies in a mix of plant molecular and developmental biology and bioinformatics. He then did a research associateship at the Plant Biotechnology Institute of the National Research Council Canada, focusing on the problem of biological data representation and integration for the purposes of automated data mining. In the subsequent 20 years, his laboratory has focused on designing biomedical data/tool representation, discovery, and automated reuse infrastructures - what are now called "FAIR Data" infrastructures. He is the lead author of the primary FAIR Data Principles paper, and lead author on the first paper describing a complete implementation of those principles over legacy data. He is a founding member of the FAIR Metrics working group, tasked with defining the precise, measurable behaviors that FAIR resources should exhibit, and the author of the first software application capable of a fully-automated and objective evaluation of “FAIRness”. He continues to pursue research in the domain of automated data discovery and analytics. In the past five years, he has established a second line of research focusing on identification of microbiome “states”, associated with different phenotypes/outcomes, and the ability to use Artificial Intelligence to predict minimally-destructive interventions that will engineer the microbiome into a more productive, performant, or healthy state. The objective of this more biologically-focused research is to achieve the introduction of precision farming into areas with limited resources and/or access to contemporary sequencing or informatics technologies.