Howard Mark was awarded the BS degree in chemistry from the City College of New York in 1963, and earned his MA degree in chemistry from the City University of New York in 1966. He was awarded the Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from New York University in 1972. He remained at NYU as a research fellow, performing research in surface chemistry and in applications of the then-new field of FT-IR spectroscopy.
Howard joined Technicon Instrument Corporation in 1976 and worked in the then-new field of near infrared analysis. While there he created, designed and developed new algorithms for NIR quantitative and qualitative analysis and applied statistical and chemometric methods to optimize test procedures. He was the first person to apply the concept of Mahalanobis Distance to spectroscopic analysis.
Howard has authored or co-authored seven patents; over 190 publications, 85 oral presentations and 13 books and book chapters on NIR analysis and on the application of statistics and chemometrics to spectroscopic analysis. He was awarded the 2003 Eastern Analytical Symposium Award for Outstanding Achievement in Near Infrared Spectroscopy.
Howard has given back to his profession via significant involvement in the Council for Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, the New York Section of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy, and the ASTM. Howard is currently president of Mark Electronics, a consulting company providing services in the fields of near-infrared analysis, chemometric and statistical data analysis, and custom instrument design and development. He is also founder and president of The Near Infrared Research Corporation.