Marc Tius was born in 1953 in Izmir, on the Aegean coast of Turkey. He moved to Greece with his parents when he was 5 years old. He attended elementary school in Kavala, and gymnasium in Thessaloniki. In 1971 he enrolled as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he majored in Mathematics and Chemistry. In 1975 he started graduate studies at Harvard in Professor E. J. Corey’s group. After a brief postdoc in the Corey group, he moved to Hawaii in August, 1980, where he has been ever since. He currently has a joint appointment in the Chemistry Department of the University of Hawaii, and at the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii.