He did his education at Harvard College where he got AB Degree in the year 1950. He continued his graduate studies with California Institute of Technology. He finished the Ph.d in the year 1953 and it was under Nobel Laureate called Linus Pauling. As reported by Pauling, Martin Karplus was the most brilliant student in his class.

He became NSF Postdoctoral Fellow of University of Oxford and he worked with Charles Coulson. He was a teacher at University of Illinois and then continued at Columbia University before starting to teach at Harvard. He had a research group at the Strasbourg in France and he has two sabbatical visits since 1992 until 1995 in Jeran Francois Lefevre NMR Laboratory in Strasbourg at Louis Pasteur University.

Martin Karplus contributed to many areas of physical chemistry like quantum chemistry and chemical dynamics and the most notable are molecular dynamics simulation for biological macromolecules. He had been influential in the nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mostly in understanding of the electron spin resonance spectroscopy and nuclear spin-spin coupling. Karplus equation describes the correlation of dihedral angles and coupling constants in the proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

According to his biography, he is now working in the research of properties of the molecules for biological interest. The group originated and then coordinated development of CHARMM program for the molecular dynamic simulation. He is the member of International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science. In his entire career, he had supervised around 200 postdoctoral researchers and graduate students in the entire long career at University of Illinois, Columbia University and at Harvard University. He had been the recipient of Christian B. Anfisen Award in the year 2001.

Other awards are Irving Langmuir Award, Linus Pauling Award and Nobel Prize in Chemistry. When he was still a child, his family fled Nazi occupation in the country of Austria. They spent time in La Baule, Switzerland, and Zurich and in France before they immigrate to live in United States.

His family had been known for being successful and intellectual Jewish family. The grandfather called Johann Paul Karplus, was an acclaimed professor in psychiatry in University of Vienna. The brother Robert Karplus had been recognized as educator and physicist of university of California. He is available as Google scholar and he can track easily his citations. His net worth is not recorded yet.