Ma Chung-pei

Ma Chung-pei is an 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 earned a PhD 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.

From 1993 to 1996 Ma had a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. From 1996 to 2001 she was an associate and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. While there she won the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. 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.

Her son is a known mathematical prodigy.

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