Mark earned a bachelor's degree in forestry from Virginia Tech in 2002 (including 2001 at the Victorian School of Forestry in Australia) and a master's degree in limnology at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland in 2008. He began working with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Lakes Program as a seasonal environmental technician from 2009 to 2012, then worked as a seasonal fisheries technician with the US Forest Service in California in 2013 and 2014, and spent a winter as a State of Alaska certified crab observer on fishing vessels in the Bering Sea.

He returned to Vermont from 2015 to 2020 to work with the DEC Lakes Program again as an environmental scientist involved in volunteer monitoring, assessment, and permitting. After a year working as a water quality scientist with Horizons Regional Council on the North Island of New Zealand, Mark has returned to Vermont once more.