Mario Blaum was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1951. He received the degree of Licenciado from the University of Buenos Aires in 1977, the M. Sc. degree from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in 1981 and the Ph. D. degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1984, all these degrees in Mathematics. From January to June, 1985, he was a Research Fellow at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Caltech . In August, 1985, he joined the IBM Research Division at the Almaden Research Center . In January, 2003, his division was transferred to Hitachi Global Storage Technologies , where he was a Research Staff Member until February, 2009. He was a Lecturer at the Electrical Engineering Department at Santa Clara University in 2008 and 2009, where he  taught the Error-Correcting Codes course. At present, he is a Consulting Researcher of the Group GASS at Complutense University of Madrid , Spain. In August 2009, he rejoined the IBM Almaden Research Center. Form 2009 to 2012, he was an Associate Editor in Coding of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

Dr. Blaum’s research interests include Storage Technology, comprising all aspects of coding and synchronization. He is a Fellow of the IEEE since 2000.