Andrew D. Martin

Andrew D. Martin (born July 25, 1972) is an American political scientist who is the 15th chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis.

As an academic, Martin has contributed widely to the areas of judicial politics, quantitative political methodology, and applied statistics, with attention paid specifically to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Early life and education
Martin was raised alongside his two brothers in Lafayette, Indiana, where he attended Hershey Elementary School, East Tipp Middle School, and William Henry Harrison High School. During that time he developed academic interests in politics and mathematics.

Martin earned his B.A. from the College of William & Mary in mathematics and government in 1994 and his Ph.D. in political science from Washington University in 1998. He was assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1998 to 2000.

Career
Martin returned to his alma mater Washington University as a member of the political science faculty in 2000, just two years after earning his Ph.D. there. In 2006 he joined the faculty of the School of Law, where he played a key role in the launch of the Center for Empirical Research in the Law, serving as its founding director from 2006 to 2014. He served as chair of the Department of Political Science from 2007 to 2011 and as vice dean of the School of Law from 2012 to 2014. In 2013 Martin was installed as the Charles Nagel Chair of Constitutional Law and Political Science.

From 2014-2018, Martin served as dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) at the University of Michigan.

Chancellorship at Washington University in St. Louis
Martin was appointed Washington University’s 15th chancellor by the university’s Board of Trustees on July 14, 2018. He began full-time service to the university on January 1, 2019, as Chancellor-elect, and began as Chancellor on June 1, 2019.

Since his tenure at Washington University in St. Louis began, Martin has positioned three strategic pillars at the forefront of his vision: academic distinction, educational access, and the university’s role and impact “in St. Louis and for St. Louis.”

Much of Martin's early chancellorship has been defined by the onset of COVID-19 and the university's operational and financial response. Notably, under Martin's leadership, the university was one of the first in the Midwest region to announce a residential campus shutdown and remote working operations, a decision that came ahead of local and state decisions to enforce similar restrictions. In addition, Washington University was one of the only higher education institutions in the United States to announce a delayed start, rather than an accelerated start, to the 2020 fall and 2021 spring academic terms and one of the first to reinstate retirement benefits and the university's salary merit increase program after the majority of institutions and organizations made similar budget cuts. During that time, scientists at the School of Medicine's McDonnell Genome Institute developed a saliva-based COVID-19 diagnostic test that is simple, fast, economical, and able to be utilized at a massive scale for screening and diagnostic testing.

Notable initiatives
In February 2019, one of Martin's first announcements as Chancellor of Washington University was the creation of the university's Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (CRE2). CRE2 officially launched in August 2020 and utilizes field-defining research, innovative learning, and strategic engagement in order to transform scholarship, policy, and clinical interventions where race and ethnicity are at the center.

During his inauguration on October 3, 2019, Martin announced the WashU Pledge, a financial aid program that provides a free undergraduate education to incoming, full-time Missouri and southern Illinois students who are Pell Grant eligible or from families with annual incomes of $75,000 or less. The WashU Pledge covers the full cost of a Washington University education, including tuition, room, board and fees.

In June 2020, Martin outlined a set of action steps to address issues of racial equity on Washington University's campus and throughout the St. Louis region, including the creation of an Equity and Inclusion Council, the hiring of 12 new faculty with a research emphasis on race, enhanced pedagogy and curricular programming, collaborative efforts to reimagine the university's police force and campus safety, increased supplier diversity in contracting and construction projects, and more.

On April 25, 2024, Martin engaged local police departments to respond to a student-led protest calling on the university to divest from Boeing, a weapons manufacturer supplying Israel in its bombing campaign on Palestinians in Gaza. The police crackdown led to approximately 100 arrests, including 23 students and 4 faculty members, and Martin subsequently banned participating students and faculty from campus, regardless if they were arrested, including City of St. Louis Board of Alderman Megan Green. A professor who was arrested for filming the protest was hospitalized for broken ribs and a broken hand after multiple officers tackled him. WashU students, faculty and community members responded with open letters and petitions to Martin for their response to the protests, including Martin's decision to evict arrested students from campus housing and ban faculty who attended the protest from campus. Martin's actions were condemned by Representative Cori Bush and City leadership.

Awards
Martin is the author of “An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research,” which he co-authored with Lee Epstein, the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor at Washington University, along with “Judicial Decision-Making: A Coursebook,” which he co-authored with Barry Friedman et al. Throughout his career, Martin has received research funding from many organizations, including Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, National Science Foundation, and National Institutes of Health. In 2021, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In addition to his many publications, Martin's most notable scholarly achievements include the Martin-Quinn scores, where he and collaborator Kevin Quinn estimated the ideologies of U.S. Supreme Court justices, as well as his contribution to the Supreme Court Database, which documents and codes every decision by a U.S. Supreme Court justice since the Founding.