Title: Executive Director of Quality Data Science
Employer: Allogene Therapeutics
Previous Role: Director of Quality Engineering, Amgen

Mark graduated from UIUC in 1998 with a BS in Cellular and Structural Biology. He began and ended college thinking he would go to Med school, but after being waitlisted he took a job for the EPA. The skills and experience learned there helped him gain employment at Abbott Laboratories supporting the manufacture of immunodiagnostic assays as a technical support scientist. In this role, he learned that analyzing data was more enjoyable than generating data in the lab, which led to an MS in applied statistics.

Mark's career eventually took to Southern California working as a Quality Engineer and Director of Quality Data Science for Amgen Inc, a biotechnology company. His roles utilize his unique understanding of biology and statistics to help scientists solve problems in manufacturing, development, quality, and even business operations.

Mark is currently working remotely for Allogene Therapeutics, a cellular therapy company that is pursuing allogenic CART cell therapies for blood cancer and solid tumors. Allogenic therapies involves taking T cells from healthy donors, doing gene editing to program the cells to target tumors while bypassing a patient’s immune system. As the Executive Director of Quality Data Science, Mark is responsible for developing and advancing the collection and use of data across the company in order to increase product and process understanding, identifying improvement opportunities and providing tools and methodologies for improved data based decision making.

Mark is a great person to talk to about how the skills you learn in your IB degree can be used in many different careers, even those you never anticipated! If you are dead set on one career that can be a great way to plan your next steps, but talk to Mark about how to plan for different options, just in case you want or need to pursue another path.

"None of your experiences are wasted, you just have to know how they can be applied"

Contact Christina Swanson at alumnimentor@sib.illinois.edu if you would like to connect with Mark.