Chung-Pei Ma

Ma Chung-Pei is a Taiwanese-American astrophysicist and cosmologist. She is the Judy Chandler Webb Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. She led the teams that discovered several of largest known black holes from 2011 to 2016.

Biography Ma was born in Taiwan to parents Huang Chao-heng and Ma Chi-shen. She started playing violin at the age of four. She attended Taipei Municipal First Girls' Senior High School and won the Taiwan National Violin Competition in 1983. She then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), receiving her Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1987. She then earned a Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1993. She studied theoretical cosmology and particle physics with Alan Guth and Edmund W. Bertschinger, her doctoral advisors. A violin prodigy as a teenager in Taiwan, winning a national violin competition in Taipei when she was 16, she also took violin classes during her college years at MIT at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music. She became a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley's Department of Astronomy in 2001.

Ma's research interests are the large-scale structure of the universe, dark matter, and the cosmic microwave background. She led the team that discovered the largest known black holes in 2011.

Ma was the scientific editor in cosmology for The Astrophysical Journal.

Awards and honors 1987 – Phi Beta Kappa Society 1997 – Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy (American Astronomical Society) 1999 – Sloan Research Fellowship 2003 – Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award (American Physical Society) 2009 – American Physical Society Fellow 2012 – American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow 2012 – Simons Foundation Fellow 2020 – American Academy of Arts and Sciences Member 2022 - American Astronomical Society Fellow 2022 - National Academy of Sciences Member 2024 - Academician, Academia Sinica

Selected publications