Mark M. Garner received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Michigan State University. As part of his graduate work he invented the now universally used gel-shift or “EMSA” assay for the study of protein-DNA interactions. He was then successively an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow and National Research Service Awardee at the NIH where his work, with Dr. Gary Felsenfeld in the NIADDK, was on the role of DNA topology and sequence in chromatin structure. He did a second postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the multicomponent thermodynamics of DNA-protein interactions. During this time Mark also developed an ongoing, long-term relationship with the the Jovin research group at the Max Planck Institut für Biophysikalische Chemie in Göttingen, Germany. Mark returned to the NIH in NICHHD where he carried out fundamental research on capillary electrophoresis of nucleic acids. In addition, he continued his studies of the effect of the intracellular milieu on biological regulatory mechanism, culminating in an extensive review he wrote with Dr. Maurice Burg for the American Journal of Physiology, which was regarded as definitive. He entered the private sector in 1995 with FMC BioProducts, and has since been a key member cutting-edge companies such as Ciphergen Biosystems, Applied Biosystems/SCIEX, Fluidigm, and now Agilent Technologies.