Mark Irwin was born in San Jose, California and grew up in Vancouver, Canada. He received a BSc in Mathematics in 1986 and an MSc in Statistics in 1989 from the University of British Columbia. In 1995, he received a PhD in Statistics from the University of Chicago under the advising of Dr. Augustine Kong.

He joined the Department of Statistics at The Ohio State University in 1993, initially as an Instructor and then becoming an Assistant Professor in 1995. In 2000, he became the Department's Statistical Computing Scientist. In addition, he is a member of the Center for Biostatistics at OSU.

His research interests include fast Bayesian approaches to Command and Control (C2), space-time hierarchical modeling, statistical genetics focusing on problems in gene mapping, statistical computing, Monte Carlo methods, and biostatistics.

In September 2003, he joined the Statistics Department at Harvard University.

See also Irwin's web-page.