Mark H. Kryder is University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and Technical Director of the Extremely High Density Recording Program of the Information Storage Industry Consortium. He received a BSEE from Stanford in 1965 and a MSEE and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Physics in 1966 and 1970 from Caltech, respectively. From 1969 to 1971 he was a Research Fellow at Caltech. From 1971 to 1973 he was a visiting scientist at the University of Regensburg, Germany and from 1973 to 1978 he was a Research Staff Member and Manager of Exploratory Magnetic Bubble Devices at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. 

He joined Carnegie Mellon as an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering in 1978, was promoted to Full Professor in 1980 and founded the Magnetics Technology Center and Data Storage Systems Center in 1983 and 1990, respectively. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the IEEE. He has received numerous prizes and awards, including the IEEE Magnetics Society Achievement Award, the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Award, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the American Institute of Physics George E. Pake Prize and, most recently, the Public Service Medal by the President of Singapore for his contributions to the development of the Data Storage Institute in Singapore. He received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2014  for the development and realization of the system of Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, which has enabled a dramatic increase in the storage capacity of computer-readable media.