Professor Randi Martin joined the Rice faculty in 1982. She became the Elma W. Schneider Professor in 1995. She served as chair of Rice’s Department of Psychology from 2002 to 2006 and currently is editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.

Martin has published numerous papers in her area. Her research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms involved in language comprehension and production in people with brain damage as well as in people with healthy brains. A long-standing research interest in her lab is the relation between short-term memory and language processing. Martin also studies speech production and the processes involved in word, phrase and sentence production. She conducts research on the structure of reading and writing systems as well, examining patients with different types of reading disorders to test models of reading. The nearby Texas Medical Center serves as a source of patient populations and provides opportunities for collaboration with medical researchers.

In 2001, Randi Martin was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest federation of scientists, for her outstanding contributions to the study of short-term memory and language processing and to the understanding of the brain organization supporting these cognitive functions. Recently she has been elected a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP). She and Prof. James Pomerantz, also a Rice professor of psychology, are the only two SEP members in Texas.

Currently there are four graduate students and one post-doc conducting research under her supervision. Since 2002, there are two to three undergraduate students working at her lab every semester. In addition, undergraduate students have opportunities to be paid as experiment subjects and get a brain image of their own.