Jan M.L. Martin (a.k.a., Gershom Martin) was born in Belgium and obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry as well as his Habilitation (college teaching qualification, requires additional dissertation) from U. of Antwerp. Following postdoctoral work at NASA Ames Research Center with Timothy J. Lee and Peter R. Taylor, he followed Dr. Taylor to San Diego Supercomputing Center. Later, Dr. Martin became a permanent research fellow of the National Fund for Scientific Research in Belgium. In passing, he obtained his Habilitation (university teaching qualification) from U. of Antwerp in 1994.

After a brief, transitional sabbatical with the late lamented Chava Lifshitz at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he accepted a faculty position at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he was granted tenure in 2001 and promoted to full professor in 2005. He spent the year July 2007-June 2008 on sabbatical with Prof. George C. Schatz at Northwestern University. From July 1, 2008 until his arrival at UNT, he served as the Senior Advisor for IT affairs to the President of the Weizmann Institute.

Dr. Mar­tin has won a num­ber of awards, includ­ing the Dirac Medal of the World Asso­ci­a­tion of The­o­ret­i­cal and Com­pu­ta­tional Chemists (2004), the Out­stand­ing Young Sci­en­tist Award of the Israel Chem­i­cal Soci­ety (2000), and the 1997 Alumni Award (one prize in Chem­istry every 5 years) of the Belgian-American Edu­ca­tional Foun­da­tion. Most recently he was awarded the 2008 Jack Wol­gin Prize for Sci­en­tific Excel­lence by the Weiz­mann Insti­tute of Science. He has published over 230 scientific papers in international scholarly journals, which have been cited over 9,000 times.

Dr. Martin is married to Wendy Gardner (a Chicagoland native he met while at NASA) and they have a teenage daughter, all three of them being owned by a native Israeli ART ("accidental rat terrier").

A native speaker of Dutch, Dr. Martin speaks and writes English at mother tongue level and is fluent in Hebrew, as well as fairly fluent in French and in German.

Some further links:

1. •Old home page at Weizmann
   

2. •Blurb in the Daily North Texan
   

3. •UNT faculty profile