Molly Martin, MD, MAPP

Dr. Molly Martin is a practicing pediatrician and faculty member of the Department of Pediatrics in the UIC College of Medicine. An IHRP Fellow, she conducts health disparities research through the Institute for Health Research and Policy, where she is a Fellow. She obtained her medical degree from the Medical College of Wisconsin and completed her pediatrics residency at the University of Chicago.

She was selected to participate in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program Fellowship at the University of Chicago, where she obtained formal research training and a master's of arts degree in public policy. She spent nine years conducting community-based participatory research at Rush University Medical Center in the Department of Preventive Medicine, Section of Social and Community Medicine. In February of 2014, Dr. Martin moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Dr. Martin is an established leader in the fields of behavioral intervention design and testing, especially as they relate to community health workers (CHWs). She has expertise in implementation science and is the Associate Director for Community Engagement for the UIC Center for Dissemination and Implementation Science. She is also active in local and national policy efforts that target health disparities. Her research focuses on community models to improve health, specifically the CHW model. She is particularly interested in asthma, oral health and obesity in children. Dr. Martin has been the principal investigator on multiple NIH-funded projects that test community-based interventions targeting these conditions. Dr. Martin’s work received the 2020 Research to Practice Award from the American Public Health Association Health Administration Section.

Dr. Martin served on the Executive Committee for Community Health Workers Section of the American Public Health Association and the Board of the Chicago Asthma Consortium. In November 2014, she was appointed to serve on the State of Illinois Community Health Worker Advisory Board, which was convened to develop community health worker workforce requirements in Illinois.

As a complement to her research, Dr. Martin sees patients in the Mile Square Health Center and participates in resident and student education.

Research Interests

Dr. Martin is interested in community health worker training and intervention testing, specifically in the areas of pediatric asthma and pediatric obesity. She works mainly with Medicaid-insured populations in Chicago. She also has methodology interests, which include the application of community-based participatory research approaches and implementation science methods to behavioral intervention development and randomized controlled trials.

For a more detailed list of publications by Dr. Molly Martin, see this list on PubMed.