Primary Job Title Founder & Scientific Advisory Board Chairman Primary Organization 
Revolution Medicines
Location Redwood City, California, United States Regions San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, West Coast Gender Male
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Marty grew up dreaming of becoming a doctor or a major league baseball player. The Orioles never called, but Johns Hopkins University did, and so he jumped at the chance. At Hopkins he also discovered a passion for chemistry and its interface with human health. So he next moved to Boston/Cambridge to pursue science and medicine in parallel at
Harvard Medical School, Harvard University and MIT. He is now Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an Early Career Scientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Marty’s lab is pioneering the development of molecular prosthetics, small molecules that serve as functional surrogates for missing proteins. To enable this research, he has developed a powerful Lego-like approach for making small molecules involving the iterative assembly of MIDA boronate building blocks, an approach that underlies REVOLUTION Medicines’ product engine. Leveraging this platform, his group has synthesized, understood, and/or improved a variety of complex natural products that perform protein-like functions. This includes discovering the mechanism of action of amphotericin B and an atomistic roadmap to improving its therapeutic index.
Marty is the recipient of a number of honors and awards, including the Thieme IUPAC Prize in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, the IOCF lectureship award, the Hirata Memorial Gold Medal from Japan, the Early Career Scientist Award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the American Chemical Society Kavli Foundation Emerging Leader in Chemistry Lecturer, the American Chemical Society Elias J. Corey Award for Outstanding Original Contribution in Organic Synthesis by a Young Investigator, the American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the UIUC Innovation Discovery Award, the Novartis Chemistry Lectureship, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, the Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Unrestricted Research Grant in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, the Eli Lilly Grantee Award, the Amgen Young Investigator Award, the AstraZeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award, and he has been named "one of the world's 35 top innovators under age 35" by MIT Technology Review.
He holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University, Ph.D. from Harvard University, and M.D. from Harvard Medical School and MIT.
