Dr. Wendy Martin leads research that deepens understanding of how key components of educational programs influence effectiveness and participant experience. She also conducts formative research and collaborative co-design projects that advance knowledge of how to design effective educational technologies and integrate them into educational environments to support student learning.

Martin is the Principal Investigator of Digital Games as Analogical Sources for Science Learning, an NSF-funded project investigating the relationships among game design, explicit analogy mapping techniques, and students’ understanding of complex science concepts. In addition, she is a staff member on the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL), a resource center for the Cyberlearning program at NSF. She also is leading the evaluation of Work-Based Learning—Preparing Incumbent Workers for Advanced Manufacturing Careers, a collaboration with Jobs for the Future, WGBH, and Owensboro, KY, Community and Technical College, which establishes a model for helping industrial workers increase their technical skills and creates a toolkit that provides guidance for other community colleges to use that model.

Previously, Martin was project manager for Possible Worlds, a National Research and Development Center in Instructional Technology, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, which developed a suite of four digital games and related instructional materials for middle-school science. Possible Worlds was chosen by Common Sense Media for its list of the Top 25 Ed Tech products for 2014. Dr. Martin recently concluded evaluations of the ScratchEd program, which provides resources and professional learning experiences to help teachers integrate the Scratch graphical programming language into formal instruction; CREATE, a NASA-funded afterschool program in which the Milwaukee Public Museum helped urban youth design and develop planetarium shows; and KC Empower, an NSF-funded program in which the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) adapted project-based science activities for students with disabilities.

Martin has contributed to seminal research that has advanced the field's knowledge of the role of technology in professional development. She was the Project Director of the evaluation of the eMINTS program, a technology professional development program that has reached hundreds of teachers and thousands of students in Missouri and has been scaled up to train thousands of teachers across the U.S. and Australia. As part of the team conducting the evaluation of the Intel Teach Essentials program—a technology professional development program that has reached millions of teachers worldwide—she provided evaluation guidance to evaluators and program managers in Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.

Dr. Martin has coauthored several articles and reports, including "Testing the Impact of a Pre-instructional Digital Game on Middle-Grade Students' Understanding of Photosynthesis" (Technology, Knowledge and Learning);  "Connecting Instructional Technology Professional Development to Teacher and Student Outcomes" (Journal of Research on Technology in Education); and "Bringing Technology Professional Development to Scale: Lessons Learned from Intel Teach to the Future" (Policy Brief).

Dr. Martin earned her bachelor degree from Duke University, her master's degree from New York University's School of Education, and her doctorate from Cornell University.