QIMR is delighted to congratulate senior scientist, Professor Nick Martin, on his election to the prestigious Australian Academy of Science for his important contributions in the genetics of human behaviour and complex diseases.
Professor Martin undertook his early training in genetics in the early seventies at the University of Adelaide where his life-long interest the role of genetic variation in individual differences in behaviour and disease susceptibility was first aroused. Drawn to the University of Birmingham in the UK, renowned for pioneering statistical methods to examine human variation, he became co-developer of the genetical analysis of covariance structure, a technique now well established within epidemiology and behavioural genetics and one which underlies the majority of multivariate analyses published in these fields today.
His PhD work at Birmingham included calculation of the large sample sizes required to accurately reject incorrect hypotheses about causes of variation. Where previously only dozens of pairs had been considered an acceptable sample, Martin’s calculations called for hundreds or thousands of pairs. This provided the motivation for his return to Australia in 1978 and his co-founding of the Australian Twin Registry (ATR) at the Australian National University with John Mathews. Today, there are over 31,000 pairs of twins enrolled in the registry which is maintained by the NHMRC and provides an invaluable resource for researchers studying in the impact of genetic and environmental factors on health. |
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For Martin, the registry provided fertile ground for fruitful national and international collaborations spanning decades of studies in various aspects of personality, intelligence, anxiety, alcoholism, asthma, endometriosis, and addiction. Many of these studies are ongoing and currently focused on identifying and locating the genes responsible for these conditions.
Professor Martin heads the Genetic Epidemiology Laboratory at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research where he initially began work in 1986 on genetic factors associated with melanoma, a disease of critical importance to the Queensland population. He now leads a group of over 70 researchers and attracts major funding from the NHMRC, ARC, NIH and EU.
During his career, he has been awarded the James Shields Award for outstanding contributions to twin research, the Fulker Prize for best paper in Behaviour Genetics twice, the Theodosius Dobzhansky Award for lifetime contributions to the field of behaviour genetics and the QIMR Ralph Doherty Prize for Outstanding Achievement and Leadership in Medical Research, November 2004. In 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and this latest honour makes him one of very few Australians to be a fellow of two national academies. Professor Martin was President of the International Behavior Genetics Association 1996-98 and since 2000 has been Editor in Chief of the international journal Twin Research and Human Genetics. |
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He has over 500 publications to his name and is listed by Hickie et al as Australasia’s most cited author in the fields of Psychiatry and Psychology.Professor Martin comments, “I am pleased not just for myself, but for the recognition this brings to the outstanding group of scientists I have brought together in the Genetic Epidemiology lab at QIMR. I only wish my father, who was a geneticist and who got me started in twin studies, had been alive to celebrate with me. “
Hickie IB, Christensen, H, Davenport TA & Luscombe GM 2005 Can we track the impact of Australian mental health research? Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 39 591-9.
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