Rachel Martin grew up in Mesa, Arizona, where she had a menagerie of lizards, snakes, and alarmingly large invertebrates. She earned her BS in Chemistry from Arizona State University in 1997 and her Ph.D. at Yale in 2002. In her graduate work, she built new instrumentation and developed sample preparation methods for solving the structures of proteins using magnetic resonance. She then did postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley, advancing magnetic resonance technology before starting her own lab at UC Irvine in 2005. Her current work focuses on proteins with unusual optical properties, extremophilic enzymes, and discovery of new chemical tools from carnivorous plants. The nuclei of atoms line up and dance when she tells them to.
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Rachel Martin