Martha Oakley received a B.A. in chemistry from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1986. After studying biochemistry as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University from 1986-1988, she was an National Science Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Peter B. Dervan at the at California Institute of Technology, studying DNA recognition by basic region-leucine zipper transcriptional activators. She was awarded her Ph.D. in 1993 and moved to M.I.T., where she was a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Peter S. Kim from 1994-1996, studying the specificity of coiled-coil interactions. In 1996, she joined the faculty in the Department of Chemistry at Indiana University. Her early work at IU focused on the design and characterization of antiparallel coiled coils and on protein-lipid interactions.

specific recognition by proteins of biologically relevant ligands