Martin Roth (16 January 1955 – 6 August 2017) was a German museum director. He was the director general of the Dresden State Art Collections (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden) from 2001 to 2011 and the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK, from 2011 to 2016. Early life Martin Roth was born on 16 January 1955 in Stuttgart, Germany. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Tübingen in 1987: his doctoral dissertation concerned "the political and historical context of museums and exhibitions in Germany between 1871 and 1945", which included the Weimar and Nazi years. Career Roth became a researcher at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris (and at the German Historical Institute Paris – Deutsche Historische Institute [DHI)], in charge of a comparative study on French and German Museum concepts in collaboration with the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). Subsequently, in 1992, he became a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He was the curator at the Deutsches Historisches Museum from 1989 to 2001, and the director of the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden, the first German science museum, from 1991 to 2000. He was the president of the Deutscher Musemsbund e.V. (German Museums Association) from 1995 to 2003, and a member of the advisory board of the Bundesminister des Auswärtigen (German Ministry of Foreign Affairs) in Berlin until his relocation to London in 2011. From 1996 to 2001, Roth was a member of the senior management of the Expo 2000 in Hanover and the director of Thematic Exhibitions. Roth was the director general of the Dresden State Art Collections, overseeing 12 museums and galleries. In 2011, he left Dresden to become the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Under his leadership, the museum received a record number of 3.8 million visitors. It opened the Europe 1600–1815 galleries in 2015 and reopened the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Galleries in 2016. The exhibition "Savage Beauty", first shown at The Metropolitan Museum in New York and reconfigured for the V&A, won the Museums + Heritage award for Best Temporary Exhibition of 2015. The V&A was also recognized as Museum of the Year by the UK's Museum Prize Trust in 2016. Other major projects during his directorship included the museum's new Exhibition Road entrance, designed by Amanda Levete; plans to expand with V&A East in