Mark Feitelson received his Bachelors of Science (BS) degree in biology/biochemistry from UCI in 1974. He was a graduate student in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the UCLA School of Medicine, where he began is studies of viral oncogenesis with the rabbit papilloma virus, and received a Ph.D. degree in 1979. He was then an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University, where he began his work with hepatitis B and related viruses. Dr. Feitelson was then recruited to the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, where he trained with Dr. Baruch Blumberg, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine (1976) for his discovery of HBV. When Dr. Blumberg went to Oxford (1990), Dr. Feitelson became an Associate Professor in Department of Pathology, Anatomy and Cell Biology at Thomas Jefferson University (1991), and later Full Professor (1996). At Jefferson, he was a member of the Kimmel Cancer Center, and Director of the Molecular Microbiology Lab at the university hospital. In 2007, Dr. Feitelson moved to the Department of Biology at Temple University. His lab has produced more than 130 publications, which include two books, many book chapters, and numerous invited reviews. Dr. Feitelson belongs to several scientific societies and was a visiting professor at five universities in China. His lab has been funded by NIH, pharmaceutical firms, and by foundations for more than 30 years. Since the early 1980's, Dr. Feitelson has been interested in the pathogenesis of chronic hepatitis B virus infection and has uncovered critical steps whereby the HBV encoded X antigen contributes to the pathogenesis of chronic liver disease and the development of HCC. He has also developed a program studying the relationship between the gut microbiome and various disease states and has recently founded a company based on a platform technology. Finally, Dr. Feitelson is the head of the Professional Science Master's Program in Biotechnology at Temple, which has been highly successful over the past few years.