Once you can sincerely say, "I don't know," then it becomes possible to get at the truth.
(Robert A. Heinlein)
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Jan M.L. Martin (a.k.a., Gershom Martin) was born in Belgium and obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry 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. Meanwhile, he obtained his Aggregaat voor het Hoger Onderwijs/Agrégation pour l'Enseignement Supérieur (university teaching qualification similar to the Habilitation in Germany, the habilitation à diriger des recherches in France or the Доктор наук in Russia) 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. Also since then, he has been the incumbent of the Baroness Thatcher Professorial Chair of Chemistry, succeeding crystallographer and pioneering supramolecular chemist Meir Lahav. He spent the year July 2007-June 2008 on sabbatical with Prof. George C. Schatz at Northwestern University. From July 1, 2008 until July 31, 2010, he served as the Senior Advisor for IT affairs to the President of the Weizmann Institute. From August 1, 2010 until July 31, 2012, he was a Distinguished University Research Professor at the Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Modeling at the University of North Texas, where he remains an adjunct professor. Since August 1, 2012, he has been back at Weizmann.
Dr. Martin has won a number of awards — most recently the 2023 Schrödinger Medal of WATOC (the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists) — but also the 2017 Israel Chemical Society Prize for Excellence, the 2004 Dirac Medal of WATOC for "the outstanding computational chemist in the world under the age of 40", the Wolgin Prize for Scientific Excellence (2008), 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. He is a foreign member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences” (KVAB) and an IUPAC Fellow. He has published about320 scientific papers in international scholarly journals, which have been cited over 25,000 times (ISI), with an h-index=83 (ISI); the corresponding values in Google Scholar are h=93 and over 31,000 citations. He serves on the editorial board of several journals, including Journal of Physical Chemistry A, Theoretical Chemistry Accounts, and Molecules.
Dr. Martin is married to Wendy Gardner (a Chicagoland native he met while at NASA) and they have a teenage daughter. A native Dutch speaker, 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. He has some passive knowledge of several other languages.