Rate My Professor Qin Ma

Qin Ma is Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. He serves as Chief of the Division of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Director of the Center for AI & Bioinformatics in Immuno-Oncology at the Pelotonia Institute for Immuno-Oncology, and Leader of the Immuno-Oncology Informatics core at the OSUCCC–James. Ma holds a PhD from the University of Georgia, a PhD from Shandong University, and a BS in Applied Mathematics from Shandong University. With over 18 years of research experience, he has served as principal investigator or multi-principal investigator on multiple projects funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.

Ma's research specializes in advanced computational methods for high-throughput omics data, particularly single-cell and spatial sequencing analyses, integrating deep graph representation learning including graph neural networks, graph transformers, and graph Fourier transforms. His work elucidates mechanisms of gene regulation, cell-cell interactions, and cellular senescence in biological systems and complex diseases, with applications in immuno-oncology. He has co-authored over 190 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Immunology, Nature Communications, New England Journal of Medicine, Nucleic Acids Research, and Genome Research, accumulating approximately 7,900 citations. Notable publications include "Deep learning shapes single-cell data analysis" (Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 2022), "Harnessing the deep learning power of foundation models in single-cell omics" (Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 2024), and "scGNN is a novel graph neural network framework for single-cell RNA-Seq analyses" (Nature Communications, 2021). Ma is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Editor-in-Chief of Computational Biology and Chemistry, and a regular reviewer for NIH, NSF, and journals including Nature Biotechnology and Nature Methods. He is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at national and international conferences.