Mark Topinka

Mark Topinka is a physicist and data scientist who has worked in a range of technical fields in the past two decades. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship in 2008 at Stanford University where he researched organic (polymer-based) solar cells, he co-founded Alion Energy, a thin-film solar panel manufacturing start-up. As Chief Scientist at Alion Energy, he helped grow the company to 50 employees and a full-scale R&D pilot line before moving on in 2012. Since then he has worked as a scientific advisor and consultant to a number of bay-area companies, from Google to a number of different small green-tech startups, helping solve varied challenges in data science, computer vision, and other technical areas that those companies faced.

He received his BA/BS in Physics and Engineering from Swarthmore College, and continued on to do his Ph.D in Applied Physics at Harvard University in low-temperature condensed matter physics, where he worked on imaging electronic wave functions in one of the the basic building blocks for quantum computers. He continued his work as an Urbanek Post-doctoral Fellow at Stanford where he switched from quantum computation research into thin-film and organic solar cells.