Mankin Mak is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has taught and researched on atmospheric dynamics for many years. He was born in Hong Kong, where he completed his high school education, before moving on to undergraduate study in engineering physics at the University of Toronto, Canada, and graduate study in meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He has published extensively in various international journals of atmospheric sciences and has served as an editor of the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.