UPOP Mentor

Mark Herschberg is the CTO of Averon. He is a cryptographer, university instructor, and championship ballroom dancer. He chairs the IEEE HTTPSI standards committee and serves on the board of TechieYouth.

Mark graduated MIT with undergraduate degrees in physics and EE/CS and then continued his graduate work at MIT working on cryptography. His master’s thesis, “Secure Electronic Voting over the World Wide Web,” created the first online voting system. He’s subsequently worked to track down terrorists and cyber criminals on the dark web.

His other work includes big data tools, lead generation, media, enterprise mobile platforms, and he was brought in as a turn-around technical lead on an NBC business unit that relaunched as Hulu. Mark helped create MIT’s seminal Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP) and HBS’s Dynamic Market’s class. He’s a part-time academic, teaching at MIT for almost two decades, annually lectures at NYU, USC and elsewhere, and speaks regularly at conferences on cyber security, technology, and entrepreneurship around the country and internationally.

Although now retired from competitions, Mark was one of the top-ranked ballroom dancers in the country. He is passionate about helping others improve their personal and professional efficacy. In addition to serving on the board of Techie Youth, he has also spent years volunteering with Streetwise Partners, Futures and Options, and TapRoot, and helped run CodeRanch for nearly a decade.