​Mark Foster earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis in 1981 and studied coal gasification with X-ray scattering for his Ph.D. research under Prof. Klavs Jensen in Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He then moved into the area of polymer science and accepted a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Erhard Fischer at the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, where he initiated his research in polymer interfaces and performed early measurements of thin films with X-ray reflectivity. Dr. Foster returned to the University of Minnesota to work as a senior postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Frank Bates in the areas of block copolymer films and neutron scattering. He joined the faculty of the Department of Polymer Science at The University of Akron in late 1990, and currently holds the rank of professor, serving also as Associate Dean of the College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering and Director of the Akron Global Polymer Academy. His research interests currently include the study of structure and dynamics of polymer interfaces and thin films using various techniques, but particularly X-ray and neutron scattering methods and scanning probe microscopy methods.​​