Martin is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at Seoul National University. His group develops open-source bioinformatics tools to analyze protein sequences and structures at scale. He is widely known for creating computational methods such as MMseqs2 for rapid sequence searching and clustering, Foldseek for large-scale protein structure comparisons, and ColabFold for accessible protein structure prediction. Collectively, these tools have been installed and utilized millions of times by researchers worldwide.
Martin earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He was the only author outside of DeepMind on the groundbreaking 2021 Nature paper introducing AlphaFold2. In recognition of his scientific contributions, he received the 2024 Overton Award from the International Society for Computational Biology.
