ALA Spotlight Series Faculty Advisor Mark F. Russo, Ph.D. Mark F. Russo received his Ph.D. in 1989 and began his profession in the field of Laboratory Automation. He has integrated many diverse robotic systems for applications in high-throughput screening, combinatorial synthesis, product formulation and X-ray crystallography. He has also authored and configured several laboratory information management systems in areas such as protein expression and combinatorial synthesis. Currently, Mark works in the pharmaceutical industry where he leads a group that introduces automation and technology into laboratories throughout Drug Discovery. Mark has served the Association for Laboratory Automation for many years as a member of the LabAutomation conference Scientific Committee, an instructor for two ALA short courses, and the Executive Editor of the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation (JALA). Mark has published extensively on topics related to laboratory automation. He has also co-authored a book on laboratory automation programming entitled Automating Science and Engineering Laboratories with Visual Basic, published by John Wiley and Sons (ISBN 0-471-25493-2).