[3] Martinis' research focuses on mechanisms, evolution, and biomedical applications of protein synthesis and RNA-protein interactions.
Keck Foundation-supported team of six research laboratories at the University of Illinois to discover and characterize non-canonical activities of as many as twenty splice variants of mammalian leucyl-tRNA synthetases.
During her high school and college years she worked summers as the cook on her father's fishing boat off the coast of Alaska.
Upon enrollment at Washington State University, she pledged Kappa Delta Sorority where she served as local chapter president.
Martinis was awarded an American Cancer Fellowship to perform postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Paul Schimmel at MIT.
In 1992 she took a research position in the biotechnology industry at Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Inc., where she was awarded the first US patent and NIH SBIR[7] grant for the company.
She then went on to be one of the first research scientists hired at Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a biotechnology company founded by Schimmel and Julius Rebek.