Seamus Martin - Biography#

Seamus Martin holds the Smurfit Chair of Molecular Genetics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (since 1999). He is a PhD graduate of The National University of Ireland and conducted his post-doctoral work at the Dept. of Immunology, University College London and The La Jolla Institute for Immunology, California. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 2002, to The Royal Irish Academy of Sciences in 2006, to the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2009, was President of the European Cell Death Organization (ECDO) from 2016-2018 and was awarded an ERC Advanced grant in 2021. He is an author (with Pete Delves, Dennis Burton and Ivan Roitt) of the 11th, 12th and 13th Editions of the widely-used Immunology textbook ‘Essential Immunology’ and is Editor-in-Chief of The FEBS Journal (Cambridge, UK), an international life sciences journal, since 2014.

The Martin laboratory at Trinity College Dublin is interested in all aspects of programmed cell death, especially the links between cell death, inflammation and cancer. Some key papers: Introduction of annexin V-labelling, the gold standard for measuring apoptosis (Martin et al., 1995 J. Exp. Med.), Unravelling the apoptosis-associated caspase activation cascade (Slee et al., 1999 J. Cell Biol.), Oncogenic Ras promotes autophagic cell death (Elgendy et al., 2011 Molecular Cell), Apoptotic cells can be pro-inflammatory (Cullen et al., 2013 Molecular Cell; Henry et al., 2017 Molecular Cell), Parkin activation can promote apoptosis (Hollville et al., 2014 Molecular Cell; Carroll et al., 2014 Cell Reports) Discovery of the mechanism of activation of the IL-36 cytokine family (Henry et al., 2016 Cell Reports; Clancy et al., 2018 Cell Reports); ER Stress promotes inflammation via TRAIL receptors (Sullivan et al., 2020 Developmental Cell); IL-37 is pro-inflammatory via IL-36 receptor engagement (Sullivan et al., 2022 Science Immunology).

Work from the Martin laboratory has been cited >40,000 (Clarivate) >65,000 (Google Scholar) times to date and Seamus Martin has given >250 invited talks at major international meetings including Cold Spring Harbor, Gordon Conferences, Keystone and other meetings including multiple Keynote talks. Dr. Martin is among the top 0.05% of World Scientists based on Impact by Stanford University (METRICS). His laboratory has graduated over 20 PhD students and many of his former PhD students and post-docs now hold independent group leader/professor positions at international institutions such as Baylor School of Medicine, Texas (USA), The MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology, Cambridge (UK), The ONJ Cancer Institute, Melbourne (Australia), Max Planck Institute, Dresden (Germany), The Gulbenkian Institute (Portugal), The University of Aberdeen (Scotland), Royal College of Surgeon's, Dublin (Ireland) and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), University of Manitoba (Canada).