Image: The Department wishes to congratulation Dr. Ping Ma on the occasion of the announcement of his renewal as UGA Distinguished Research Professor (DRP), effective on July 1, 2026. Dr. Ma was first named DRP in 2021 based upon his stellar record of innovative methodological accomplishments in statistics, data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and bioinformatics, as well as an outstanding record of interdisciplinary collaboration on important problems throughout science. Since that time, he has continued an outstanding level of productivity, having authored 47 publications across leading venues (e.g., Journal of Machine Learning Research, Annals of Applied Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and proceedings volumes of theInternational Conference on Machine Learning and International Conference on Learning Representations); delivered 37 invited, keynote, and plenary talks; sustained robust extramural support with four active awards as PI/coPI that directly fund the Ma Lab; and mentored trainees who earned nine awards, including ASA section student paper honors. Ping Ma is Distinguished Research Professor in the UGA Department of Statistics with affiliations to the School of Computing, Institute of Bioinformatics, and the Center for Cyber-Physical Systems. Among his awards and honors, he is Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Statistical Association (ASA), past Faculty Fellow of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and past Beckman Fellow at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s Center for Advanced Study. Over his career, Dr. Ma has more than 110 refereed publications in areas such as AI, machine learning, and bioinformatics, many of which have appeared in top-tier journals and conference proceedings. He has been extraordinarily successful in attracting external funding for his research with 22 grants to his credit, mostly from the NSF and NIH, and including the prestigious NSF CAREER grant and multiple NIH R01 grants. Dr. Ma's research is a unique blend of high-quality novel statistical theory, highly efficient algorithms, and wide-ranging interdisciplinary applications, particularly in the biomedical sciences. Collectively, this work has brought Dr. Ma extraordinary national and international recognition as one of the world’s leading data scientists. Type of News/Audience: Departmental
