Martin Schröder was born near London of refugee Estonian parents and was first in family to attend university. He gained his BSc in Chemistry from the University of Sheffield, and PhD from Imperial College, University of London under the supervision of Professor W.P. Griffith. After postdoctoral fellowships at the ETH, Zürich with Professor A. Eschenmoser, funded by a Royal Society - Swiss National Foundation Fellowship, and at the University of Cambridge with Lord Lewis of Newnham, he was appointed to a Senior Demonstratorship at the University of Edinburgh in 1982. He was subsequently promoted to Lecturer, Reader and then Professor, and in 1995 was appointed to the University of Nottingham as Head and Professor of Inorganic Chemistry. He was Head of the School of Chemistry at Nottingham (1999-2005) and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science (2011-2015). In 2015 he moved to his current position as Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Manchester.

He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and the Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France. He has published 580 publications and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). His awards include the Corday-Morgan Medal and Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Royal Society of Edinburgh Support Research Fellowship, Tilden Lecturer of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Society of Chemistry award for the Chemistry of Transition Metals, a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award, a Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship, and the Royal Society of Chemistry award for Chemistry of the Noble Metals and their Compounds. He has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Tallinn Technical University, Estonia (2005). He has held many research awards including ERC Advanced and Proof of Concept, EPSRC Programme and Russian Mega grants. In 2016 he was elected Member of the Academia Europaea. In 2020 he was awarded, the Royal Society of Chemistry Nyholm Prize for Inorganic Chemistry, and in 2024 the Royal Society of Chemistry Dalton Horizon Prize as part of the Functional Framework Materials Team.  

His research interests lie in the area of materials chemistry, specifically the design, synthesis and study of porous metal organic framework materials for energy and environmental applications. Current focus lies in the separation and capture of fuel and toxic gases and hydrocarbons, and applications of porous materials in catalysis, clean-up and proton conductivity.