Daniel Martínez, one of the world’s leading scholars on hydroids, specializes in evolutionary developmental biology and the evolution of aging. His long-term work suggesting the theoretical “immortality” of the freshwater hydra has brought him national attention.

In 2010, he received a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for research on “Mechanisms underlying lack of senescence in members of the genus Hydra.” In 2013, he received a grant from The Immortality Project at the University of California Riverside to study the implications of hydra’s unlimited lifespan on medicine and increasing human longevity.