Born and raised on the Canadian prairies, by day Mark is a Senior Software Engineer at Google working on core Artificial Intelligence technologies for mobile devices, and by night he is the founder of "Bibles and Brew", a Catholic men’s fellowship group that encourages men to grow in their faith and masculine identity.
He spent a year in the spiritual formation program at Madonna House (1999), volunteered for a year with Catholic Christian Outreaches VINE program (2004), and participated in 3 of their other summer missions. He is the “Hollywood Undercover Missionary” a monthly segment on Salt+Light Radio airing nationally on Sirius XM. He speaks on JP II’s Love and Responsibility, male identity, overcoming pornography addiction and surviving as a Christian in Hollywood.
Professionally he is a visual FX expert having worked 10 years with DreamWorks Animation. He holds 22 feature film credits including "Kung Fu Panda", "Shrek Forever After" and "Madagascar 2". His algorithms gave more fire to explosions, fluff to hair and jiggle to bellies. He received two DreamWorks Technical Achievement Awards for his volume rendering and hair modeling systems and has been awarded a patent for hair data compression.
Mark has worked for Electronic Arts on "John Madden Football '07" and "March Madness 2007", and as a master control Operator for the Saskatchewan Communications Network. He holds an M.Sc. (computer science) from the University of Calgary, as well as a B.Sc. (computer science) and B.Eng. (engineering physics) from the University of Saskatchewan.
