Martin received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003 and was awarded a Robert Wood Johnson fellowship in the Health and Society Scholars program at Columbia University. Fundamentally, her research seeks to understand how inequalities are produced and reproduced across family generations. She has investigated family influences on children’s educational attainment, adult welfare use, and adolescent obesity. Her current research leverages a natural experiment to investigate the causal effects of gains in family income on children’s health and well-being.