Mark Adler

Mark Adler, born in 1959, is an American software engineer and space mission engineer best known for his work in data compression. He is the author of the Adler-32 checksum function, a co-author with Jean-Loup Gailly of the zlib compression library and gzip, a contributor to Info-ZIP, and a participant in the development of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image format. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1990. After working at Hughes Aircraft he was Lead Mission Engineer on the Cassini-Huygens mission from 1992 to 1995, then Mars Exploration Program Architect at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and later Spirit Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission. With Gailly he received the 2009 USENIX Software Tools User Group award.