Professor Nick Martin is a human quantitative geneticist interested in complex traits of medical importance. In 1978 he founded the Australian Twin Registry as a resource for biomedical and behavioural research. In recent years has moved to genome wide association studies (GWAS) to locate genes influencing a wide variety of complex biomedical traits as diverse as depression and blood cell counts. He developed statistical methods for multivariate genetic analyses which are widely used. He has won international awards, published over 1000 papers, and is a fellow of the Australian academies of both science and social science.