Kelsey C. Martin, M.D., Ph.D.
Independent Investigator

Kelsey C. Martin, M.D., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Biological Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received a bachelor’s degree in English and American Language and Literature at Harvard University and then spent two and a half years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), working in maternal and child health care. She obtained an M.D. degree and a Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University, where she studied the nuclear transport of influenza viruses in host cells in the laboratory of Dr. Ari Helenius. Turning her interest to neurobiology, she pursued her post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Eric Kandel at Columbia University, where she studied the cell biology of learning-related synaptic plasticity.

Dr. Martin became a faculty member in the Departments of Psychiatry and Biological Chemistry and in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA in 1999. Her laboratory studies the cell biological mechanisms whereby neurons change the strength of their connections with experience—a process that underlies learning and memory in the brain. She is particularly interested in forms of synaptic plasticity that depend on changes in gene expression. Using cell culture systems from the marine mollusk Aplysia californica and from the rodent hippocampus, Dr. Martin’s laboratory has elucidated roles for active nuclear import pathways in transporting signals from the synapse to the nucleus during transcription-dependent plasticity, and for mRNA localization and regulated translation during synapse-specific forms of long-term plasticity.

Dr. Martin is a member of the Brain Research Institute, the Mental Retardation Research Center and the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA. She also serves as the Co-Director of the UCLA-Caltech Medical Scientist Training Program. She is the past recipient of a NARSAD Young Investigator Award, a W.M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholar Award, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, a McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience Young Scholar Award, a Klingenstein Fellowship Award in Neurosciences, an EJLB Scholar Award, as well as the 2001 Daniel X. Freedman Award from NARSAD and the 2001 Jordi Folch-Pi Award from the American Society for Neurochemistry. In 2006, she was appointed as the Eleanor Leslie Term Chair in Innovative Brain Research at UCLA.

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