Martino was born in Heidelberg and grew up in Berlin. He studied in Pisa at the University of Pisa and at the Scuola Normale Superiore. During the summer between his second and third year, he worked in G. Cecere’s Lab at the Institut Pasteur (Paris) on the role of piRNAs in gene regulation in C. elegans. For his Bachelor’s thesis, he studied the age-dependent effect of the drug Rotenone on the lifespan of the short-lived killifish N. furzeri under the supervision of A. Cellerino. During his Master’s thesis, he studied the age-dependent regulation of the synaptic transcriptome in mice in A. Cellerino’s Lab (Jena). After discovering the MPI during a summer internship at the Bruguès Lab, he joined the Vastenhouw Lab as a predoc, where he will be studying the chromatin organization during the zygotic genome activation (ZGA). In his free time, he plays the violin, listens to music and watches movies.