Rate My Professor Bing Ma

Bing Ma, PhD, serves as Assistant Professor with primary appointment in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. She is also affiliated with the Institute for Genome Sciences and the Center for Advanced Microbiome Research and Therapeutics. Dr. Ma obtained her Bachelor of Medicine from Henan Medical University in 2002, Master of Science from the University of Georgia in 2005, and Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011, specializing in omics technologies. Following her PhD, she joined the Institute for Genome Sciences as a postdoctoral fellow in 2008 under Dr. Jacques Ravel and advanced to faculty in 2014.

As a computational biologist, Dr. Ma applies state-of-the-art omics technologies, including microbiome, metabolome, and metatranscriptome analyses, alongside bulk and single-cell RNA-seq, to decode microbial signals and host interactions for developing live biotherapeutics. Her research focuses on gut microbiome influences in conditions such as leaky gut in preterm infants, early-life immune development, chronic visceral pain relief in irritable bowel syndrome, gut microbiome-driven alloimmune responses in solid organ transplantation outcomes, and vaginal microbiome functional diversity. She has developed VIRGO and VOG, non-redundant gene catalogs for vaginal microbial communities, and VIRGO2, an enhanced version providing insights into functional and ecological complexity. Dr. Ma received a Milken Institute SPARC grant for her project 'Prognostic and Mechanistic Metabolomic Drivers of Sarcoidosis Progression,' aiming to identify blood-based biomarkers and test interventions in profibrotic signaling, in collaboration with Dr. Wonder Drake. Her 138 publications have garnered over 7,600 citations. Key works include 'Bifidobacterium mechanisms of immune modulation and potential utility in immunotherapy' (2023), 'Integrating compositional and functional content to describe the vaginal microbiome' (2023), 'Immunosuppressants rewire the gut microbiome-alloimmune axis through time-dependent and tissue-specific mechanisms' (2025), 'VIRGO2: an enhanced gene catalog of the vaginal microbiome provides insights into its functional and ecology complexity' (2025), and 'Rapamycin immunomodulation utilizes time-dependent genetic programs to promote allograft tolerance' (2025).