Mark J. Kushner received the BS in Nuclear Engineering and the BA in Astronomy from the University of California at Los Angeles; and the MS and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology. After a post-doctoral appointment, Mark served on the technical staffs of Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Spectra Technology before joining the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was the Founder Professor of Engineering and held several administrative positions. Mark served as Dean of Engineering at Iowa State University before joining the University of Michigan in 2008. His research addresses the fundamentals of low temperature plasmas and their applications. Mark has held several leadership positions in professional societies, conferences and in scientific publishing, as well as participating in national assessments of plasma physics.