Jean Isobel Martin was born in Melbourne in 1923 and studied in Sydney graduating with an MA in Anthropology from the University of Sydney in 1945. In 1943-1947, 1949-1950 and 1956 she was employed as a lecturer at the university. She took her PhD in Anthropology and Sociology at the Australian National University in 1955. She was appointed as lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney in 1956; Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne from 1966-1974; and in 1974 held position of Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU. Her major publications were Refugee Settlers (1965), Community and Identity (1972), The Migrant Presence (1978). The results of her research into the first Vietnamese refugee immigrants were published as The First Wave: The settlement of Australia's first Vietnamese (1985). She was president of the Sociological Association of Australia and New Zealand (1969-71) and elected a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1971. Martin died in Sydney on 25 September 1979.