PhD GARY EDWIN MARTIN

Dr. Martin holds a B.S. in Pharmacy from the University of Pittsburgh (1972) and a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry/Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Kentucky (1976) studying under the direction of Professor George A. Digenis. He has been involved in various aspects of heterocyclic chemistry and NMR spectroscopy for more than 55 years. Dr. Martin was a Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Houston (1975-1989) where he was also the director of the UH NMR Facility before moving to the pharmaceutical industry in 1989. He has held senior research positions in several major international pharmaceutical companies during his nearly 30-year tenure in the pharmaceutical industry. Prior to retiring from Merck in 2018, he was the senior member of the Structure Elucidation Group at Merck & Co., Inc., where he was directly responsible for the structural characterization of isolated drug impurities, degradation products and drug metabolites, the latter based on the application of heteronuclear 2D NMR techniques on 1 to 5 microgram samples of the isolated drug metabolites.

Over the course of his career, Dr. Martin has been named a distinguished alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy (1992). He co-founded the SMASH Small Molecule NMR Conference in 1999, which he chaired in 2000 and again in 2012, and he is now an emeritus member of the organizing committee for that annual international scientific meeting. He was the 2012 recipient of the Merck Edward J. J. Grabowski Process Chemistry Award. In 2016 he was named a distinguished graduate alumnus of the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy for lifetime achievement in the pharmaceutical sciences. That same year he was named the James N. Shoolery award recipient for lifetime individual contributions to small molecule NMR and was also the 2016 recipient of the Eastern Analytical Symposium award for outstanding achievements in nuclear magnetic resonance.

He has been an Adjunct Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Seton Hall University since April 2017 and an Adjunct Professor of Chemistry & Chemical Biology at Stevens Institute of Technology since September 2019. Professor Martin has been the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Magnetic Resonance in Chemistry since 2016, retiring from that position in 2024 and an Assistant Editor of the Journal of Heterocyclic Chemistry since 1984. Professor Martin also serves on the editorial advisory boards of several major journals. He authored an early monograph on 2D NMR methods and has co-edited two volumes devoted to the application of modern NMR methods in natural product structure elucidation. He was also the section editor of the 2nd edition of the three-volume series Modern Magnetic Resonance. He has published more than 320 scientific papers and invited reviews, more than 40 chapters and has delivered more than 500 invited lectures and seminars over the course of his scientific career.

Dr Martin’s research interests have largely centered on the development of new experimental NMR methods for structure characterization as well as on the development and application of new NMR probe technologies for the characterization of extremely small samples of natural products, drug impurities and metabolites using heteronuclear 2D NMR methods. His interests in this area were pivotal in spear-heading the development of 3 mm, 1.7 mm, and cryogenic NMR probe technologies. He pioneered the utilization of long-range 1H-15N applications in structure elucidation and has had a long-standing interest in Computer-Assisted Structure Elucidation (CASE) methods. He has also played a major role in the advancement of covariance NMR processing methods. More recently he has focused his research efforts on the incorporation of broadband decoupling and other modifications of ADEQUATE experiments, including 19F detection for the characterization of fluorinated environmental pollutants, to improve the sensitivity and general utility of these powerful but sensitivity challenged experiments. In parallel, his recent research has focused on the utilization of residual chemical shift anisotropy (RCSA) methods for the unequivocal definition of the molecular constitution and configuration that has led to recent papers in Science, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, J. Am. Chem. Soc., Chemical Science, Chemical Communications, and Organic Letters, among others. Most recently he was a co-author on a Nature Communications paper that demonstrated the use of sub part-per-billion isotope shifts to differentiate two-bond from three-bond long-range heteronuclear correlations in HMBC data, resolving a 40-year conundrum in the interpretation of these data.