Martin T. Zanni received his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley, USA, and was a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is currently the Meloche-Bascom Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Zanni is one of the early pioneers of 2D IR spectroscopy and has made many technological innovations that have broadened the capabilities and scope for a wide range of multidimensional spectroscopies and microscopies. He utilizes these new techniques to study topics in biophysics, chemical physics, photovoltaics, and surfaces. He founded PhaseTech Spectroscopy Inc., which is the first company to commercialize 2D IR and 2D Electronic spectroscopies.

He has received many national and international accolades for his research. Notably, he is the only person to have received the American Chemical Society Nobel Laureate Signature Award as both a student and a mentor and the first person to receive both the Craver and the Coblentz Awards. He is a Fellow of Optica and the American Physical Society. In 2022, he received the Ellis R. Lippincott Award "for innovative contributions to the technology and application of two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy."