He received multiple undergraduate degrees from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1982, a master of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1989, and a Doctor of Philosophy in chemical engineering from The University of Texas in 1998.
He became acquainted with lithography while working at the Microelectronics Research Laboratory of the National Security Agency. After an assignment to Sematech, he quit his job at the National Security Agency and founded FINLE Technologies (1990) to commercialize PROLITH, the simulator he had developed to model optical and chemical aspects of photolithography. FINLE Technologies was purchased in February 2000 by KLA-Tencor, which now markets PROLITH. He is currently an adjunct faculty member at The University of Texas at Austin. He writes a quarterly column called the Lithography Expert.
In 2005, he was the subject of the first annual Chris Mack Roast at the International Society for Optical Engineering Microlithography conference.
