Kin Fai Mak gained his BS in Physics and Mathematics from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2005 and his PhD in Physics from Columbia University in 2010. He remained as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia until 2012, when he joined the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science. In 2014, Mak became Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University, then returned to Cornell 2018 as assistant professor. There, he became Associate Professor in 2019 and Full Professor in 2022. He has been director at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg since mid-2024.

His honours include Fellowships of the Packard Foundation (2016) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2017), the OCPA Outstanding Young Researcher Award (2016), the Presidential Early Careers Awards for Scientists and Engineers (2019) and the American Physical Society Fellowship (2021). In 2022 he was awarded a $1.25 million grant by the Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative.