Mark Rober is an engineer and an inventor who makes science videos for YouTube. He grew up in Brea, California, and went to Brea Olinda High School. He also started CrunchLabs, a company that makes kits for kids to build things and learn about engineering. His work has drawn praise from MIT and from a professor at Brigham Young University.

Rober earned degrees in mechanical engineering at Brigham Young University and the University of Southern California, then joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2004. He spent nine years there as a mechanical engineer. Seven of those years were on the team for Curiosity, a rover that went to Mars. While working on rover arms and descent-stage jet packs, he also earned a master's degree from the University of Southern California. A BYU mechanical engineering professor said Rober is leading more people into developing engineering skills, an effect that could be huge over time.

At JPL, Rober worked on the Descent Stage of the Curiosity mission, which TED describes as the jet pack that lowered the rover to the surface. In 2012, Gizmodo reported that he started work on Curiosity right away and was responsible for the design of a part that would be important during the science part of the mission. NASA says Curiosity set out to answer whether Mars ever had the right environmental conditions to support small life forms called microbes. NASA says that early in the mission, its scientific tools found chemical and mineral evidence of past habitable environments on Mars.

In 2013, CNN reported that Rober had quit his job as a mechanical engineer at NASA and started Digital Dudz, a company making costumes that integrate tablets and smartphones. He sold the Halloween costume company to Morphsuits in 2013 and worked there for two years.

In 2017, the Orange County Register wrote that Rober had helped drive the Science Channel show The Quick And The Curious and had made more than 50 educational YouTube videos. He worked at Apple on product design in its Special Projects group. In 2018, CNBC and Variety reported from patent filings that he had been helping Apple develop virtual reality for entertainment in self-driving cars. While working at Apple, he kept making YouTube videos as a fun, creative outlet. In 2019, he left his job at Apple and made his YouTube channel his full-time work. As of December 2022, MIT said his channel had 23 million subscribers and more than 3 billion views. In September 2021, the Institution of Engineering and Technology described him as having over 18 million subscribers.

Rober made sand act like a liquid with a process called a fluidized bed. When the right amount of air moves through the sand, it flows like a liquid, and when the air stops, it turns solid again. He could not find instructions for the sand pool he imagined, so he read industrial patents for ideas. The designs showed many small air holes rather than one large inlet, so he tinkered with the number and spacing of the holes until his design worked. He turned sand into liquid after 25 attempts. Every project he builds has mishaps and dead ends along the way, and the builds are harder than his short build montages make them look.

In June 2023, Rober gave the main speech at the MIT graduation. MIT's commencement committee chair said Rober's gift for making complex ideas relevant and fun has helped public understanding of science and STEM education. The chair also said his technical expertise, with an extraordinary talent for communication, lets him show the practical power of science and engineering. At MIT in 2023, Rober showed his advice to engage in occasional playful anarchy by having a drone fly his graduation cap up instead of throwing it. His second piece of advice to the graduates was to frame their failures in a positive light, as something to learn from.

Rober teamed up with the YouTuber MrBeast to help the environment. Together they started Team Trees with the Arbor Day Foundation. In 2021, Variety reported that Team Trees, launched in 2019, set out to raise $20 million to plant 20 million trees and brought in more than $23 million. The Team Trees website said, as of November 2026, that the project had reached 25 million trees. They also started Team Seas to clean up trash from oceans, rivers and beaches.

CrunchLabs says its engineering factory is a real place in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. It wants kids to learn to think like an engineer. Its Class CrunchLabs program gives teachers science lessons for free. Rober wants kids to love science and engineering.

Words to know

• microbes: small life forms
• Curiosity: a Mars rover
• kits: things to build