Jian Ma, the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, has been elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Founded in 1848, the AAAS is the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society. Its fellows are a distinguished cadre of scientists, engineers and innovators who have been recognized for their achievements across disciplines.

Ma earned the honor of fellow “for significant contributions to the development of computational biology methods for studying genome structure and function.” He joined Carnegie Mellon in 2016 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a faculty member. His research focuses on developing computational methods — particularly machine learning algorithms — to uncover the human genome and cellular organization and study their implications for health and disease.

Ma’s lab continuously explores new paradigms at the interface between machine learning and biomedicine, including recently developing a series of new algorithms for single-cell 3D epigenomics and spatial genomics. Since 2020, he has led a $10M multi-institutional, multidisciplinary National Institutes of Health center for unveiling the complexity of the cell nucleus.

Three CMU colleagues from the College of Engineering join Ma as 2022 fellows: Burcu Akinci, Jonathan Cagan and Jean VanBriesen.

Learn more about the 2022 class of fellows on the AAAS website.