Kelsey Martin

Education and career

Martin majored in English and American Language and Literature at Harvard University, earning her B.A. cum laude in 1979. She spent two years volunteering with the Peace Corps in Zaire before resuming her post-graduate education. Martin returned to the United States and obtained her MD/PhD degree from Yale University in 1992. Her graduate thesis work investigated the nuclear transport of influenza virus ribonucleoproteins in the laboratory of Ari Helenius. She went on to postdoctoral training with Eric Kandel at the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University. At Columbia University, she made the seminal discovery that a single axonal branch can be the substrate for synaptic plasticity associated with learning and memory.