W. Mark Saltzman graduated with distinction from Iowa State University, earning a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in May of 1981. He obtained his graduate training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning an M.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Medical Engineering in 1987.

Dr. Saltzman accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University in 1987 and a joint appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1990. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1992 and to Professor of Chemical Engineering in 1995. In 1996, Dr. Saltzman accepted a position as Professor of Chemical Engineering at Cornell University.

Dr. Saltzman's research interests include controlled drug delivery to the brain, polymers for supplementing or stimulating the immune system, cell interactions with polymers, and tissue engineering.

In 1990, Dr. Saltzman received the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award. He received the Allan C. Davis Medal as Maryland's Outstanding Young Engineer in 1995, the Controlled Release Society Young Investigator Award in 1996, and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Biological and Medical Engineers in 1997. Dr. Saltzman has also received awards for teaching from Johns Hopkins and Cornell. In 2000, he was honored with the Professional Progress in Engineering Award from Iowa State University and was named the Britton Chance Distinguished Lecturer in Engineering and Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2001, he was selected as the first BP Amoco/H. Laurance Fuller Chair in Chemical Engineering at Cornell.

Dr. Saltzman was named the Goizueta Foundation Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at Yale as of July 1, 2002.