Name:
Professor Ian Martin HonFBPhS
Organisation:
Aston University and University of Alberta, Edmonton, ALTA, CA
Year elected:
2011
Primary professional setting:
Academia
After graduating in Chemistry from Bristol, I spent three years in the pharmaceutical industry, before returning to academia, obtaining a PhD while working in the MRC Neuropharmacology Unit in Birmingham. The benzodiazepine minor tranquilisers had recently been introduced to the market, providing a focus for initial studies into their mechanisms of action, inevitably leading to our work on the GABAA family of ligand gated ion channel receptors. After moving to a permanent position with the MRC Neurochemical Pharmacology Unit in Cambridge, these efforts broadened into other members of this receptor family, stimulated by the structural studies being carried out in the neighbouring MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. In 1992 I moved to head the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada returning to Aston University, Birmingham in 1997. My interests remain in the structure-function relationships within this family of proteins.