Dr. Martin is Professor and Chief of the Division of Clinical Epidemiology and Health Services Research in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). His clinical training is in internal medicine and infectious diseases, and he has served as attending physician at the San Francisco General Hospital HIV/AIDS program clinic. He is formally trained in clinical and epidemiologic research methods at UC Berkeley, where he earned a master of public health degree with concentration in epidemiology. He is the former director of UCSF's Training in Clinical Research (TICR) program (https://ticr.ucsf.edu), in which he served as director of the UCSF Advanced Training in Clinical Research (ATCR) certificate program and founding director of the UCSF Master's Degree Program in Clinical Research. In the UCSF Graduate Division, Dr. Martin directs the foundational introductory course, Epidemiologic Methods (EPI 203). He is also one of the main architects of the epidemiology and biostatistics curriculum for the UCSF School of Medicine.
Dr. Martin's research methodology is best characterized as using the methods of epidemiology and biostatistics to derive biologic and clinical inferences. His substantive areas of interest are infectious diseases and cancer, with a special focus on HIV infection and its complications, notably Kaposi's sarcoma (KS), Kaposi's sarcoma–associated herpesvirus (KSHV) infection and cervical cancer. All of his work is collaborative and multidisciplinary; indeed, all of his projects are built specifically as robust platforms to support a variety of collaborative projects. Because of the compelling nature of the HIV epidemic in Africa, much of his work is centered there. In the COVID-19 era, Dr. Martin has pivoted some of his portfolio to focus on aspects of both acute-phase and post-acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Dr. Martin's principal domestic research involves direction, along with Dr. Steven Deeks, of the NIH-sponsored Study of the Consequences of the Protease Inhibitor Era (SCOPE), a prospective cohort of HIV-infected adults. SCOPE was established to conduct translational research related to HIV, with the overarching objective to provide research access to a group of well-characterized, contemporary HIV-infected patients of diverse demographic and clinical status (https://cfar.ucsf.edu/cores/clinical-and-population-sciences). SCOPE, which contributes to the North American International Epidemiologic Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) consortium, also serves as a fertile training ground, with many faculty members owning NIH K awards that depend on the cohort. Dr. Martin also directs the Specimen Core of the eight-site Center for AIDS Research Network of Integrated Clinical Systems (CNICS) Cohort (https://www.uab.edu/cnics). CNICS has documented the routine course of clinical care from over 40,000 HIV-infected adults and collected serial biological specimens from a large fraction. The Specimen Core supports projects which seek to discover causal or predictive determinants of various clinical phenotypes as well as to describe various human host or pathogen-related parameters in a large nationally representative in-care population. Most recently, Dr. Martin has contributed to the study of both the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection (along with Dr. Dan Kelly of UCSF) and the post-acute phase (along with Drs. Deeks, Michael Peluso and other investigators of the NIH RECOVER Initiative).
In international research, Dr. Martin leads several NIH-sponsored ongoing projects in Africa. The first, performed in collaboration with the East Africa IeDEA network and Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) in Uganda, is one of the first uses of rapid case ascertainment to study cancer in Africa. Dr. Martin’s group is performing RCA to study various aspects of Kaposi’s sarcoma, including incidence, pathway to diagnosis, stage of disease at diagnosis, and survival. The second project, in collaboration with Cornell University and the IDI, is developing a nucleic acid amplification-based device for the point-of-care diagnosis of KS. The work is slated to have field sites in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Botswana, and Malawi. A third project, performed in collaboration with Duke University and the IDI, is developing a public health approach to the prevention and early detection of cervical cancer. This approach features community-based self-administered HPV screening and mobile treatment provision. A fourth project is the Uganda AIDS Rural Treatment Outcomes (UARTO) cohort, which followed 744 HIV-infected adults who initiated antiretroviral therapy in Mbarara, Uganda. Patterned after the SCOPE cohort, UARTO features rigorous research-level questionnaires and biological specimen collection; the focus is translational research. Finally, in Liberia, Dr. Martin and Dr. Krysia Lindan lead an NIH Fogarty International Center-sponsored training program in clinical and epidemiologic research in which Liberian scholars receive formal didactic training at UCSF and then perform mentored research in their home country.