Mark Mascal received his PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from the University of London, and has worked in the laboratories of two Nobel laureates. He started his academic career at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, from which he moved to the US to take up a Visiting Professor of Chemistry position at UCLA in 2000. He was then appointed Assistant Professor of Chemistry at UC Davis in 2003, advancing to full Professor in 2011. He was named the 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Alternative Energy Technology at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, and was a 2021 National Academies Jefferson Science Fellow in the US State Department. Most recently, he received a 2021 UC Davis Chancellor's Innovation Award and a 2022 Environmental Protection Agency Green Chemistry Challenge Award. The major thrust of his research program is in the areas of sustainable chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, and computational modeling. He is involved in startup companies spun off from intellectual property that originated in his lab in the areas of sustainable production of biobased materials, cardioprotective supplements, and therapies to combat refractory epilepsy. One of the companies that licenses technology from his lab, Origin Materials, has recently become the first publicly traded carbon-negative materials company.