Dr. Martinez is an infectious disease ecologist at Columbia University in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences. She earned her Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolution in 2015 at the University of Michigan, followed by two years at Princeton University. She became an Assistant Professor at Columbia in 2017. Her primary focus is understanding the drivers of seasonality in infectious disease systems and the impact of biological rhythms on disease. Supported by the NIH Early Independence Award, her current research agenda aims to understand the ecological, demographic, physiological, and environmental drivers behind epidemic-prone diseases, including poliomyelitis, measles, and chickenpox — all with the aim of informing vaccination policy.

Importantly, Dr. Martinez’s lab also conducts research on maternal immunity in infants and is building a statistical inference pipeline for studying vaccine modes of action. She utilizes cutting-edge statistical inference techniques and mathematical models to couple disease incidence data with clinical data to gain insight into the population dynamics of disease.