Martin Beer was born in Erlangen and graduated in veterinary medicine in 1992 in Munich. In 1995, he received his PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich studying the T-cell immunity against bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV).

In 2000, Martin Beer moved to the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI) as head of the reference laboratory for bovine herpesvirus type 1 infections and continued his work on BVDV and other pestiviruses.

Since 2004, he is head of the Institute of Diagnostic Virology at the FLI, working with transboundary animal diseases, zoonosis and emerging diseases like avian influenza virus, Schmallenberg virus or SARS-CoV-2. Modern diagnostics, molecular epidemiology and pathogenesis studies with transboundary viral diseases (e.g Bluetongue Disease virus and African swine fever virus) and viral zoonoses (e.g. influenza- and corona-viruses) are a major focus of his research. For selected viruses, also the development of strategies for immunoprophylaxis is an important research goal. A special feature is the work with animals including livestock animals under BLS3 and BSL4 (animal) conditions.

During the past years, especially workflows for virus characterization and discovery using next-generation sequencing (NGS) were developed and several new viruses could be identified and further characterized.