Biography

Rainer E. Martin was born in 1970 in Dornbirn (Vorarlberg, Austria) and studied chemistry at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich, where he received his diploma in 1995. In the group of Prof. F. Diederich, he worked on the synthesis and physical investigation of monodisperse poly(triacetylene) oligomers and obtained his Ph.D. in 1998. In September of the same year, he moved to the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis, Cambridge U.K., for postdoctoral research with Prof. Andrew B. Holmes on electroluminescent polymers supported by a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) and a Junior Research Fellowship awarded from Churchill College. He started his professional career at F. Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel in 2000 as Head of the Laboratory in Formulation Research and moved in May 2002 to Discovery Chemistry, working over the years on various projects from different indication areas, including metabolic diseases, neuroscience, oncology, and ophthalmology. Currently, he holds the position of Group Leader and Expert Scientist in the department of Medicinal Chemistry. His primary focus is on specialized chemistry technologies, including parallel chemistry, photo- and electrochemistry, flow chemistry, and purification. Additionally, he has a keen interest in lab automation and the integration of deep learning and high-throughput experimentation for late-stage functionalization.