Mark D. Butala earned his Ph.D. in 2010 from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

He then joined the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology as a member of the Ionospheric and Atmospheric Remote Sensing group. In 2017, he joined the faculty at the ZJU-UIUC Institute, International Campus, Zhejiang University. His research interests include the theory of remotely sensed image formation, Monte Carlo and statistical signal processing theory and practice, and the application of rigorous Bayesian methodology to big data problems in science.