2016 EAS Award for Outstanding Achievements in NMR

Gary Martin Merck
Gary Martin
Merck

Dr. Gary Martin is a Senior Principal Scientist in the Merck Research Laboratories in Rahway, New Jersey.  He holds a B.S. in Pharmacy from the University of Pittsburgh (1972) and a Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry/Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Kentucky (1976).  He was a Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Houston where he was also the director of the UH NMR Facility before moving to the pharmaceutical industry in 1989. He serves on the editorial advisory boards of several major journals.  His career in NMR spectroscopy has spanned more than 45 years.  He has written a widely utilized monograph on 2D NMR methods and has recently co-edited two volumes devoted to the application modern NMR methods in natural product structure elucidation. He has published in excess of 275 papers, over 35 invited reviews and chapters, and has delivered more than 500 seminars and lectures at national and international meetings.  His on-going research interests have centered on the development of new NMR methods for the molecular structure characterization of impurities and degradants of pharmaceuticals, drug metabolites, and natural products. Much of his research effort has focused on the exploration of new NMR probe technologies for the characterization of extremely small samples using heteronuclear 2D NMR methods.  His interests in this area were pivotal in the initial development of 3 mm and 1.7 mm NMR probe technologies, the former are now universally used in chemistry laboratories and the pharmaceutical industry world-wide.  He was also involved in the early development and evaluation of cryogenic NMR probe capabilities.  His recent work has focused on pushing down the limits of detection for heteronuclear 2D NMR experiments using 1.7 mm cryogenic NMR probe technology, which allows the characterization of low microgram samples of drug metabolites. He has had a long-standing interest in 2D long-range heteronuclear shift correlation techniques.  He led one of the first two laboratories to exploit natural abundance long-range 1H-15N heteronuclear shift correlation experiments for natural product structure elucidation.  He has developed numerous new heteronuclear 2D NMR methods including experiments to exploit proton-detected carbon-carbon correlations at natural abundance. His interests in NMR data processing led to the development of unsymmetrical indirect covariance (UIC) NMR processing methods that allow the mathematical combination of several 2D NMR experiments to afford correlation data that would be very time-consuming or impossible to acquire otherwise.