Martin Spiess (born 11 October 1955 in Zürich) is a Swiss Biochemist and former professor at the Biozentrum University of Basel, Switzerland.

[1] Martin Spiess studied and graduated with a doctorate in biochemistry at the ETH Zurich.

[2] Martin Spiess investigates topogenesis and the intracellular transport of membrane proteins in eukaryotic cells.

He studies the mechanism of translocon function and how proteins are sorted in the cell and transported to their designated organelles.

Spiess discovered that the translocon, in particular the asymmetric polarity along the pore, determines the thermodynamic equilibrium between integration of individual proteins segments into the cell membrane and their further transport.