Seamus Joseph Martin

BSc, PhD(NUI). FTCD

Smurfit Professor of Medical Genetics TCD

Member ScienceElected in 2006

Seamus Martin holds the Smurfit Chair of Medical Genetics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (since 1999).

He is interested in all aspects of programmed cell death (apoptosis), especially the links between cell death, inflammation and cancer. We introduced annexin V-labeling, which has become the gold standard for measuring apoptosis, unravelled the apoptosis-associated caspase activation cascade, showed that Parkin activation can promote apoptosis and discovered the mechanism of activation of the IL-36 cytokines which are important drivers of psoriasis.

Seamus is the Editor-in-Chief and Chairman of The FEBS Journal, the major journal of the Federation of European Biochemical Sciences, published bi-weekly. He also serves on several other editorial boards including: Cell Reports, Science Signaling, Oncogene, The Journal of Biological Chemistry, Cell Death and Differentiation.

He has authored (with Pete Delves, Dennis Burton and Ivan Roitt) the 11th, 12th and 13th Editions of the classic Immunology undergraduate textbook ‘Essential Immunology’.

Our work has been cited over 30,000 times (h-index 76).

Awards
Wellcome Trust Prize Fellowship Award (1994-1996)
Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow Award (1996-2001)
Science Foundation Ireland Awards (2002-07, 2008-14, 2015-20)
The BA Charles Darwin Award (2005)
The GlaxoSmithKline Award of The Biochemical Society UK (2006)
The RDS/Irish Times Boyle Medal (2015)
The International Cell Death Society, New York, Prize (2016)