Professor Seamus Martin awarded 2025 Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal
Posted on: 22 November 2024
Prof. Martin MRIA, Smurfit Professor of Medical Genetics within Trinity’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, won the Medal in Life and Medical Sciences. He was recognised for making a demonstrable and internationally recognised outstanding scholarly contribution in his field.
Prof. Martin has made major contributions to our understanding of programmed cell death (known as apoptosis), which is a process that eliminates billions of cells from our tissues each day with surgical precision. Apoptosis is a highly regulated mode of cell death that helps to maintain tissue health by culling aged, injured and infected cells, as well as those cells in the early stages of cancer.
Cell apoptosis. Image: Prof. Seamus Martin.
Prof. Martin is internationally recognised for his contributions to our understanding of how apoptosis is regulated and for his discovery of a major marker for the identification of apoptotic cells. Understanding the genes that regulate cell death has provided new insights into how cancers arise and has contributed to the development of novel cancer therapeutics.
Prof. Martin was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2009, and to Academia Europaea in 2023. He is an author of the acclaimed immunology textbook Essential Immunology and has served as Editor in Chief of The FEBS Journal (Cambridge, UK), as well as on the editorial boards of several international scientific journals.
Professor Martin is a winner of several major awards, including the RDS-Irish Times Boyle Medal, The GlaxoSmithKline Prize, was awarded a European Research Council Advanced grant in 2021, and has lectured within the Department of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin for the past 25 years.
The Royal Irish Academy awards two RIA Gold Medals every year. The medals acclaim Ireland’s foremost thinkers in the humanities, social sciences, physical and mathematical sciences, life sciences, engineering sciences and the environment and geosciences.
Prof. Anne Fuchs MRIA, Director, Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin, was awarded the 2025 RIA Gold Medal in Humanities. Professors Martin and Fuchs will be presented with their Gold Medals at a special ceremony at Academy House in February 2025.