Rate My Professor Chung-Pei Ma

Chung-Pei Ma is the Judy Chandler Webb Professor in Physical Sciences and Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research in space science centers on theoretical cosmology and astrophysics, investigating the properties of dark matter and dark energy, the cosmic microwave background, gravitational lensing, galaxy formation and evolution, supermassive black holes, and the large-scale structure of the universe. She received both her undergraduate degree and Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. After her doctorate, she was a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology in 1993, followed by positions as Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania starting in 1996 and Associate Professor in 2001. Ma joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 2002 and served as the cosmology scientific editor for The Astrophysical Journal from 2007 to 2017. Her observational work includes studies of galaxies and supermassive black holes using telescopes at Palomar and Keck, contributing to discoveries of massive black holes with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns.

Ma's highly cited publications include 'Cosmological perturbation theory in the synchronous and conformal Newtonian gauges' (1995), 'The NANOGrav 15 yr data set: Evidence for a gravitational-wave background' (2023), and 'Revisiting the scaling relations of black hole masses and host galaxy properties' (2013). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds fellowships from the American Physical Society, American Astronomical Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. Earlier awards include the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award from the American Physical Society (2003), Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy (1997), Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (1999), and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1999).