Mark Eugene Russinovich (born December 22, 1966) is a Spanish-born American software engineer and author who serves as CTO of Microsoft Azure. He was a cofounder of software producers Winternals before it was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Early life and education Russinovich was born in Salamanca, Spain and was raised in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, until he was 15, when he moved with his family to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was a radiologist and his mother was a business administrator of his father's radiology practice in Pittsburgh. Russinovich is of Croatian descent. He was introduced to computers when his friend's father got an Apple II in the 1970s. He was able to reverse engineer its ROM and write programs for it. At age 15, he bought himself his first computer, a Texas Instruments TI99/4A. About six months later his parents bought him an Apple II+ from his local high school when it upgraded the computer labs to Apple IIes. He also wrote magazine articles about Apple II. In 1989, Russinovich earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha Beta Sigma chapter. The following year he received a Master of Science degree in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He later returned to Carnegie Mellon, where he received a Ph.D. in computer engineering in 1994 with thesis titled Application-transparent fault management. under the supervision of Zary Segall. Career From September 1994 through February 1996 he was a research associate with the University of Oregon's computer science department. From February through September 1996 he was a developer with NuMega Technologies, where he worked on performance monitoring software for Windows NT. In 1996, he and Bryce Cogswell cofounded Winternals Software, where Russinovich served as Chief Software Architect, and the web site sysinternals.com, where Russinovich wrote and published dozens of popular Windows administration and diagnostic utilities including Autoruns, Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, TCPView, and RootkitRevealer among many others. From September 1996 through September 1997, he worked as a consulting associate at OSR Open Systems Resources, Inc., a company based in Amherst, New Hampshire. From September 1997 through March 2000, he was a research staff member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, researching operating system support for Web server acceleration and serving as an operating systems expert. Russinovich joined Microsoft in 2006, when it acquired Winternals Software. In