125 stories for 125 years

Jennifer Martin

Associate Professor Jennifer Martin began her studies at the college in 1979. Excelling in all her subjects, Jennifer was awarded the Gold Medal in 1981. After her registration, she returned to the college in 1983 to undertake her Master of Pharmacy under the guidance of Peter Andrews, specialising in computer-aided drug design.

After completing her masters in 1985, Jennifer was awarded the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Scholarship, taking its name from an endowment made available after the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. The scholarship has been awarded to many notable and successful Australian scientists, including Mark Oliphant and Nobel Prize winner Sir John Cornforth. The scholarship funds a three-year stay at Oxford or Cambridge. Jennifer applied for the scholarship before the college had become a part of Monash University and was the first recipient to be awarded the scholarship outside a university.

Jennifer was simultaneously offered an interview for a Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Award for Young Australians, which she declined due to her success with the 1851 scholarship. The QEII board recommended she still sit the interview. As she was in England, Jennifer asked Geoff Vaughan to attend her interview on her behalf. According to Geoff, the board was particularly interested that Jennifer politely declined the offer of their scholarship, as she considered herself fortunate enough to have received the 1851, and felt it should go to someone more deserving. Jennifer was subsequently awarded the QEII. Jennifer studied protein crystallography and structure based drug design at Oxford University from 1986 to 1990.

After Oxford, Jennifer took up a post-doctoral position at Rockefeller University, New York. She then moved back to Australia to take up a position in Peter Andrews' Centre for Drug Design and Development (3D Centre) at the University of Queensland. Jennifer is currently an Associate Professor within the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) and continues to be recognised for her outstanding research achievements with numerous awards.

In 2005 Jennifer was acknowledged for her world leading research in the field of drug design and protein structure with a Smart Women Smart State Award. The awards recognise the achievements of women in the areas of science, engineering, and information and communication technology. In the same year, Jennifer was also awarded the prestigious Roche Medal, bestowed by the Australian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, for her internationally recognised achievements in the fields of structural biology and protein crystallography. In 2006, she was the recipient of the Women in Biotechnology Inaugural "Outstanding Biotech Researcher" award.

Jennifer's work in the field of protein folding and protein interactions has been published in respected journals such as Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. Her research has contributed new knowledge that has led to the development of improved HIV protease inhibitors for the treatment of AIDS and to the formation of one of Australia's foremost biotech companies, Xenome, which develops drugs from conotoxins for the treatment of chronic pain. Jennifer is a member of the National Scientific Advisory Committee to the Australian Synchrotron, a member of the council of Questacon (the National Science and Technology Centre) in Canberra, and she remains involved in Angstrom Art, an initiative she set up at IMB to communicate science to the public.