Mark Bentum was born in Smilde, The Netherlands, in 1967. He received the MSc degree in Electical Engineering (with honours) from the University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, in August 1991. In December 1995 he received his Ph.D. degree for his thesis "Interactive Visualization of Volume Data" also from the University of Twente. From December 1995 to June 1996 he was a research assistant at the University in the field of signal processing for mobile telecommunications and medical data processing. In June 1996 he joined the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (ASTRON). He was in various positions at ASTRON. In 2005 he was involved in the eSMA project in Hawaii to correlate the Dutch JCMT mm-telescope with the Submillimeter Array (SMA) of Harvard University. From 2005 to 2008 he was responsible for the construction of the first software radio telescope in the world, LOFAR (Low Frequency Array). In 2008 he became an Associate Professor in the Telecommunication Engineering Group at the University of Twente. He is now involved with research and education in mobile radio communications. His current research interests are short range radio communications, novel receiver technologies (eg. in the field of radio astronomy) and sensor networks. He is a Member of the IEEE, NERG, KIVI and the Dutch Pattern Recognition Society and has acted as a reviewer for various conferences and journals.