Martin is a computational biologist with a background in biological sciences. After majoring in microbiology and immunology at the Université de Montréal, he undertook a Master's degree in bioinformatics at the Infectious Disease Research Centre in Quebec City, where he studied the genomics of parasitic protists. His interest in regulatory sequences in the non-protein coding genome brought him to Australia, where he completed a PhD in genomics and computational biology at the University of Queensland's Institute of Molecular Bioscience. His thesis (UQ's lucky 10,000th!) demonstrated that a substantial fraction of mammalian genomes harbours evolutionary signatures of molecular function through the conservation of RNA structures.

Dr Smith then leveraged the rise of high-throughput sequencing technologies during his postdoctoral research at the Garvan Institute for Medical Research in Sydney, where he developed new computational solutions for the analysis of human transcriptomic data. As an early adopter of nanopore sequencing technology, Dr Smith then founded the Genomic Technologies Program at the Kinghorn Centre for Clinical Genomics in 2017, where his group developed new genomic applications for real-time single molecule sequencing. In 2019, Dr Smith moved back to Canada to lead a research team at the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Centre (Canada's largest mother-child hospital) and teach bioinformatics at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at the Université de Montréal.

Dr Smith has founded two commercial nanopore sequencing platforms and is listed as an author on several patents. His research interests are focused on transcriptomics and the integration of real-time sequencing and machine learning into new clinical applications.