Posted: 7/15/2026
Martin receives award for achievements as new professor
Rene Martin's career as a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has been packed with action and achievement from the start.
Since beginning in August 2024, the fish biologist has swum with sharks while co-leading three studies abroad in the Bahamas. She has published seven articles about bioluminescence and biofluorescence—the ability to glow—in fish. She has achieved worldwide recognition by discovering bioluminescence in Birds of Paradise and gaining coverage from about 60 news outlets. She has mentored two graduate students and seen one to graduation. She has taught two classes, vertebrate zoology and ichthyology, and begun preparing to teach Life 121 and Scientific Philosophy and Ethics in the fall. Besides all that, she has given birth to her first child and worked through times of sleep deprivation.
The School of Natural Resources recently recognized such accomplishments by bestowing Martin with its 2026 Early Career Faculty Award. The award recognizes a faculty member who has had an impact within the school in the first six years of employment at Nebraska.
Martin said she hadn't expected the award since she was only in her second year but it meant a lot to her.
"It's definitely a representation and an acknowledgement of the effort I feel like I've tried to put in over the last two years, the very short time that I've been here," she said.
Lindsey Chizinski, an ecology lecturer and co-leader on two of the Bahamas trips, nominated Martin, saying the new professor makes shared leadership feel seamless. She noted that Martin had volunteered repeatedly for public outreach events and continued successfully publishing while mentoring students and expanding research opportunities for them with the Bahamas study abroad.
"Through her approach to mentorship, scholarship and collaboration, she is an excellent role model for women in science and a colleague I really enjoy working with," she said.
Martin came to Nebraska from the American Museum of Natural History in New York where she worked as a postdoctoral researcher studying deep-sea and near-shore fish. Both can show bioluminescence, but she said it was far more common in deep-sea fish. Their body parts and functions that glow can aid them in camouflaging themselves, attracting prey and communicating to other fish, among other uses.
Nebraska students more familiar with sunfish, bass and catfish have been drawn to her research and the possibility of launching a career in marine biology from home.
"To know that you can be a marine biologist, even in Nebraska, they've kind of come out of the woodwork," she said.
She shows them how she has managed a career as a marine biologist in Nebraska by traveling to other places like the Bahamas for research and using specimens the university maintains for teaching and research. She can also advise them on institutions closer to shore and possibly connect students with them, if desired.
"Just having that role and being able to do one or the other, I think has been nice," she said. "I've gotten a lot of undergrad interest and grad interest just to talk about how to navigate those career choices and career paths."
Besides fostering the interests of college students, she also meets with much younger students at events like Sunday with a Scientist at Morrill Hall and Know Your Nebraska Invasives Day with the Nebraska Invasive Species Council and Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.
"Kids could come up and be a scientist for a day, where they would measure fish and weigh fish to see what it was like to be a fish biologist,” Martin said.
She said she loves teaching students and that’s one reason she became a professor.
"But reaching beyond that and showing other science and teaching other science is something I really enjoy doing," she said.
One of her goals she stated for the next five years is to create and offer a marine biology course or two. Shorter-term goals she listed, and has already started on, are to catch up on lab work and fieldwork and clean and revitalize the school's collections of fish specimens to make them great for teaching.
