Martin Nicolaus ("Marty N.") is one of the founding members and the first CEO of LifeRing.  He is the author of Recovery by Choice: Living and Enjoying Life Free of Alcohol and Drugs, a Workbook, and of How Was Your Week: Bringing People Together in Recovery the Lifering Way, both published by LifeRing Press.  From time to time, he writes the New Recovery blog.

Nicolaus is a graduate of Shawnee-Mission High School in Mission, Kansas.  He attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, majoring in Letters, and graduated with honors and Phi Beta Kappa.  He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he completed a master's degree in Sociology.  He lectured in Sociology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.  Nicolaus was active in the civil rights movement as a volunteer in Jackson, Mississippi, and as an anti-Vietnam war activist in New York City.  Among his publications from this period is the first English translation of Karl Marx' Grundrisse (Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy).  He later completed Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California in Berkeley, and became a member of the California Bar.  He is an attorney in private practice in Berkeley, California.  He is also a long-time reader of Scientific American and a past subscriber to Science and Nature. 

He has been clean and sober since Oct. 2, 1992, and is a frequent speaker to audiences of people in recovery and treatment professionals.