Martínez was appointed a co-editor of the Annual Review of Physical Chemistry in 2012[2] and is credited beginning with its 2014 issue.

[3] Professor Martínez is a theoretical chemist whose research focuses primarily on developing first-principles approaches to chemical reaction dynamics, starting from the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics.

He developed a method known as ab initio multiple spawning, or AIMS, which predicts the dynamic evolution of systems having conical intersections.

He has created models for photoinduced isomerization in retinal, which represents the biophysical basis for vision.

He has also shown how videogame hardware, especially graphical processing units (GPUs), can be used to accelerate quantum chemistry simulations.