Ma Named 2025 ACM Fellow
Adam KohlhaasWednesday, January 21, 2026Print this page.
Jian Ma, the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, has been named a 2025 fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Ma was recognized for contributions to computational biology algorithms and machine learning approaches for understanding genomes and cells. He joins Lujo Bauer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as CMU's faculty members named in this cohort.
The ACM fellow distinction is the organization's highest membership grade and honors individuals whose work has made a significant and lasting impact on computing. Fellows are selected by their peers through a highly competitive review process, with the total number limited each year. Ma and Bauer are two of 71 fellows admitted in the 2025 class.
Ma's research focuses on developing biologically grounded AI and machine learning methods to uncover principles of cellular organization, communication and function, with implications for health and diseases that include cancer and neurodegeneration. His lab in the university's Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department develops computational approaches for studying cellular architecture, single-cell epigenomics and spatial tissue dynamics. Ultimately, the goal is to learn the language of cells and harness generative AI to transform how we understand and model biological systems.
Ma has helped advance ongoing efforts to build cellular AI models, a central focus of CMU's Center for AI-Driven Biomedical Research (AI4BIO), which aims to foster campus collaboration and integration with programmable cloud labs. Ma is also a Guggenheim fellow, as well as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Society for Computational Biology.
The ACM will induct its fellows at a banquet this June in San Francisco.
For more on this year's ACM fellows, visit the association's website.
Aaron Aupperlee | 412-268-9068 | aaupperlee@cmu.edu