Mark Mba Wright, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, was recently featured in a profile for the Iowa NSF EPSCoR newsletter. Mba Wright is originally from Equatorial Guinea, and when his brother encouraged him to study mechanical engineering at Iowa State, Mba Wright said he couldn’t tell a nut from a bolt.
He was hired for a summer job by Robert Brown, now leader of the Iowa NSF EPSCoR bioenergy platform, and made a long-lasting connection. After receiving his Ph.D. from Iowa State, Mba Wright took a post-doctoral position at MIT and returned as an assistant professor at Iowa State in 2012.