Martin Moskovits has degrees in Physics and Chemistry from the University of Toronto. He co-founded OHM Distributers and Manufacturers Ltd., an electronics company in Toronto in 1966. It was sold in 1969. He returned to the University of Toronto to complete a Ph.D. in chemical physics (1971). From 1971-73 he was employed as a materials scientist by Alcan Research and Development in Kingston Ontario. He returned to take up a faculty position in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, where he was promoted to professor in 1982 and later was Chair of that department (1993-1999).

In 2000 he moved to UCSB as Worster Dean of Science. From 2007-2010 he was Chief Technology Officer of API Technologies in New York; and from 2011-2012 Provost at the City College of New York. In 2008 he co-founded Spectra Fluidics, a company that combines SERS with microfluidics to develop high-sensitivity molecular sensing.

Moskovits is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, OSA, and the Royal Society of Canada and former member and past Vice Chair of the US Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee 2001-2010. He was Guggenheim Fellow in 1987; 1993 Gerhard Herzberg Award of the Spectroscopy Society of Canada; 1993 Royal Society of Chemistry (London) award in Surface and Colloid Science; 1995 Johannes Marcus Marci Medal of the Czech Spectroscopy Society; 2008 NanoTech Briefs, Nano 50 Innovator award; and the 2010 Ellis R. Lippincott Award recipient of OSA.