Professor Jennifer Louise "Jenny" Martin is an Australian scientist, academic, and was recently the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation) at the University of Wollongong, in New South Wales. She is a former Director of the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery at Griffith University. and a former Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of Queensland. Her research expertise lies in the areas of structural biology, protein crystallography, protein interactions and their applications in drug design and discovery.
Education
Martin completed a Bachelor of Pharmacy at the Victorian College of Pharmacy in Melbourne from 1979 to 1981, receiving the Gold Medal for the best student in the B Pharm course. After spending a year as a trainee pharmacist, she completed a Masters in Pharmacy, supervised by Professor Peter Andrews, on the application of computational chemistry to opioid analgesics, which piqued her interest in research and led to her first scientific publications. She then left Australia to undertake a DPhil at the University of Oxford supported by a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Science Research Scholarship and four other scholarships and bursaries. Under the guidance of Professors Peter Goodford and Louise Johnson, her PhD research used protein crystallography to design glycogen phosphorylase inhibitors as potential anti-diabetic compounds. Martin paid tribute to the positive influence that Louise Johnson had on her career upon her death in 2012. In 2015, Martin completed the London Business School four-week Senior Executive Programme as part of a cohort of 50 industry, government, not-for-profit and academic leaders from around the world.
Scientific career
After completing her PhD she returned briefly to Australia to take up a post-doctoral position at Bond University in 1990. However, the unexpected closure of the School of Science and Technology resulted in her leaving Australia early in 1991 to take up a post-doctoral position with Professor John Kuriyan, a structural biologist, at Rockefeller University in New York to work on the disulfide bond forming family of proteins (DSBs) in Escherichia coli. She solved the structure of the DsbA protein which was published in 1993 in the high impact journal Nature.
In 1993 Martin received an ARC Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship. This enabled her to return to Australia and establish the first protein crystallography lab in Queensland, which is now known as the UQ Remote Operation Crystallisation and X-ray Diffraction (UQ ROCX) Facility, of which Martin is the Foundation Director. She remained at the University of Queensland until 2015, supported by several other fellowships: an Australian Research Council (ARC) Senior Research Fellowship in 1999, and a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Senior Research Fellowship in 2007. In 2009, Martin was one of just 15 researchers, and only two women, to receive an inaugural ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship. In 2016, Martin was appointed Director of the Eskitis Drug Discovery Institute at Griffith University, which hosts unique drug discovery resources including Compounds Australia and NatureBank
Since returning to Australia and establishing her own research group, Martin has continued working on DSB proteins and with collaborators is now developing inhibitors of these bacterial proteins as a potential means of combatting antibiotic resistance. She also began working on other proteins including phenylethanolamine N-methyl transferase (PNMT), an enzyme that catalyses adrenaline synthesis. Martin published the structure of this enzyme and later, as part of her ongoing research into different PNMT substrate-bound complexes, she and her team became the first remote access user of the Australian Synchrotron. Over the past 10 years, she and her team have also contributed significantly to the structural biology of membrane fusion, a fundamentally important process that underpins systems as diverse as neurotransmission and blood glucose control. She wrote an invited commentary for The Conversation in 2013 on this topic, and was invited to present a keynote lecture on her membrane fusion research at the 23rd triennial International Union of Crystallography Congress held in Montreal in 2014. In March 2019 Martin joined the University of Wollongong as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation).. She stepped down from the role in June 2022.