Emil John Martinec (October 4, 1958, Downers Grove, Illinois) is an American theoretical physicist born in 1958. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1979 and obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984. He spent the last two years of his graduate education at SLAC after his dissertation advisor, Michael Peskin, left Cornell for SLAC. He is currently a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. He is a specialist in string theory.