Faculty Retirement
Professor Craig Martin formally retired in May 2025, and says he is still working on the “retirement” part. While he misses teaching courses, his new status has enabled him to devote more time to research at UMass and to the development of his commercial spin-out, Waterfall Scientific.
Following his hiring into Chemistry many years ago, his group studied a simple model system (the “hydrogen atom”) for the central process in life’s Central Dogma — the DNA-directed polymerization of RNA by RNA polymerase. The lab has studied almost every aspect of this complex enzymological process and insights gained along the way are now informing his current lab’s development of better ways to make RNA with the system (the pandemic solutions were wonderful, but exciting new therapeutics will require still higher purity, lower cost, etc).
Several of the lab’s key practical innovations rely on discoveries from the lab going back 20-30 years. Foundational to everything was a finding by graduate student Eddie Esposito (PhD, 2005) that covalently crosslinking the polymerase to its target DNA promoter nevertheless allowed full length RNA synthesis (up to 8.6 kb, recently) and the process is resistant to salt.
Recent advances have benefitted wonderfully from a collaboration with Sarah Perry’s lab in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department here at UMass. They are masters of the fluidics process, which is the ultimate goal of Waterfall’s development pipeline. Waterfall Scientific (Worcester, MA) is now commercializing the lab’s UMass efforts of the past 10 years, with the goal of providing higher purity RNA, faster, and at lower cost. This is particularly critical for personalized therapeutics.
As for the “still working on retirement” part of the story, the Martin and Perry labs together have an NIH grant to go beyond simple RNA, with aims to use the above platform to synthesize RNA with site-specific base modifications. You may remember that RNA is composed of A, C, G, and U? Well, it turns out that our cells put all sorts of chemical “decorations” on RNA, and those modifications impart special function on the RNA/mRNA. Normal RNA polymerase reactions can’t handle this, but with automated fluidics, lab researchers are “walking” the polymerase along the DNA, with stops for modifications — all under software control. The initial goal is to provide precisely decorated RNAs for cell biologists, who are still trying to figure out what all of the modifications in our RNA do, but down the road, perhaps some therapeutics will require designer modifications. We’ll be there, ready to produce modified RNA for therapeutics as well.