Dr. Martin Schechter is a professor, and was the founding director, School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia.

Martin combines interests in clinical epidemiology and health services research with HIV/AIDS and urban health research. He is co-director of the recently established Centre for Excellence in Indigenous Health at UBC. He was a co-founder of the CIHR Canadian HIV Trials Network, a national network of investigators and research facilities aimed at conducting trials of HIV therapies, preventions, and vaccines and served as national director of the Network from 1993 to 2014.

Martin co-founded the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and served as its first director of epidemiology and population health; he is a former director of the Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences (CHÉOS). He was the founding president, Canadian Association for HIV Research and co-chaired the XI International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver in 1996. He was president of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences from 2007 to 2009 and served on the Board of Governors of the Council of Canadian Academies during that time. Martin joined the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research in 2006 as its first chief scientific officer.

Martin is the author of more than 350 peer-reviewed publications and 590 abstracts and scholarly presentations. In 1994, he was invested into the Order of British Columbia for his contributions to research. He received the Science Council of British Columbia Gold Medal in 2002, fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada in 2004, and fellowship in the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences in 2005.