Mark Russinovich

Mark Russinovich
Russinovich at PDC10, October 2010
Born	c. 1966 (age 50–51) Salamanca, Spain
Occupation	CTO of Microsoft Azure
Known for	cofounder of Winternals Software and Sysinternals.com
Website	www.markrussinovich.com

Mark Eugene Russinovich (born c. 1966) is CTO of Microsoft Azure. He was a cofounder of software producers Winternals before it was acquired by Microsoft in 2006.

Russinovich was born in Salamanca, Spain and was raised in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, until he was 15, when he moved with his family to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was a radiologist and his mother was a business administrator of his father's radiology practice in Pittsburgh. Russinovich is of Croatian ancestry.

He was introduced to computers when his friend's father got an Apple II in the 1970s. He was able to reverse engineer its ROM and write programs for it. At age 15, he bought himself his first computer, a TI99/4A. About six months later his parents bought him an Apple II+ from his local high school when it upgraded the computer labs to Apple IIe's. He also wrote magazine articles about Apple II.

In 1989, Russinovich earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha Beta Sigma chapter. The following year he received a Master of Science degree in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He later returned to Carnegie Mellon, where he received a Ph.D. in computer engineering in 1994 with thesis titled Application-transparent fault management under the supervision of Zary Segall.