David Martín is a developmental biologist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE, CSIC-Universitat Pompeu Fabra) Spain. He is interested in a fundamental question: what is developmental time, and how is it generated, interpreted, and regulated as development unfolds? His research investigates how cells and tissues acquire temporal identity, how developmental transitions are restricted to specific periods, and how endocrine and genetic signals coordinate these processes across the organism. Insects, with their sharply defined life stages and extraordinary diversity of developmental strategies, provide a particularly powerful system in which to address these questions.

A central theme of his research is insect metamorphosis, where developmental time is organized by the interplay between the two major insect hormones, ecdysteroids and juvenile hormone, and a conserved set of stage-specific transcriptional regulators. His work has been instrumental in the discovery and functional characterization of E93 and Chinmo as key temporal regulators of insect development, and he introduced the concept of the Metamorphic Gene Network: a conserved regulatory framework formed by Kr-h1, Chinmo, Broad, and E93 that integrates endocrine information to assign juvenile, pupal, and adult temporal identities and control transitions between them. His current research explores how this temporal network interacts with hormonal signals, growth checkpoints, and tissue-specific morphogenetic programs, and how its evolutionary rewiring has generated the remarkable diversity of insect life cycles. More broadly, his work uses insect metamorphosis to uncover general principles of how developmental time is encoded and unfolds, and how evolution reshapes its regulatory logic to generate new forms and life histories.