Mark Rober is an engineer and an inventor. He makes science videos for YouTube. He grew up in Brea, California, and went to Brea Olinda High School. He earned degrees in mechanical engineering at Brigham Young University and the University of Southern California. In 2004, he joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 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. He worked on the jet pack that lowered the rover to the surface and on hardware for collecting dirt samples.
NASA says Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012. At that time, it was the largest robot ever to land on another planet. It landed in Gale Crater, a crater with a tall mountain in the middle. The mountain has many layers of rock, made of different minerals from different time periods. NASA describes Curiosity as car-size and about as tall as a basketball player. It has a 7-foot-long arm that places tools close to rocks selected for study.
Rober worked at Apple on product design in its Special Projects group. CNBC and Variety reported in 2018 that he helped Apple develop virtual reality. It was meant to entertain people riding 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. He made his YouTube channel his full-time work.
In 2011, Rober's iPad Halloween costume helped launch his YouTube channel. His first video, that year, got more than a million views. 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. MIT lists two of his video titles as "Egg Drop From Space" and "Can You Swim in Jell-O?" It says each video explores some aspect of science or engineering. As of April 2026, he puts up a new video about once a month.
Rober teamed up with the YouTuber MrBeast to help the environment. They started Team Trees, a project with a goal of planting 20 million trees. It worked with the Arbor Day Foundation to plant them. They also started Team Seas to clean up trash from oceans, rivers and beaches.
In June 2023, Rober gave the main speech at the MIT graduation. He has been a guest on the TV show Jimmy Kimmel Live. People have called him a Willy Wonka for engineers.
Rober started CrunchLabs, a company that makes kits for kids. CrunchLabs says its engineering factory is a real place in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Kids use the kits to build things and learn about engineering. CrunchLabs 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
- rover: Mars explorer
- Curiosity: a Mars rover
- kits: things to build
