Marty attended Penn State as an undergraduate and received his B.S. degree in Chemistry with distinction in 1986. He then moved to Boston to join the lab of Professor JoAnne Stubbe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he began investigating the mechanism of nucleotide synthesis by the metalloenzyme Ribonucleotide Reductase. After defending his Ph.D. in 1993 , he moved to the lab of Professor Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School for postdoctoral studies where he was supported by an NIH Fellowship. He returned to his alma mater in 1995 as a faculty member, initially in the Penn State Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and was appointed also in the Department of Chemistry in 2004.

Marty styles himself the founder of the Penn State metallobiochemistry supergroup, having helping to recruit Squire Booker in 1999, Carsten Krebs in 2002, Amie Boal in 2013, Joey Cotruvo in 2016, and Alexey Silakov in 2017. While all the groups collaborate frequently, Marty’s joint research group with Carsten, made official in 2005, has been particularly productive, combining kinetic and mechanistic dissection with spectroscopic characterization. Together, they explore in great detail biochemical pathways and reaction mechanisms involving activation of molecular oxygen and its partially reduced forms at transition metal centers.

Outside the lab, Marty enjoys exercise and reading the news on Twitter.