Chung-Pei Ma

Ma has made profound impact in both observational and theoretical astrophysics. She led the science team that discovered the first supermassive black holes with masses exceeding ten billion suns in the local universe, a finding that is revising scientists’ understanding of black hole formation. Ma laid the foundation of the relativistic linear perturbation theory for structure growth in the Universe, originated the analytic “halo model” and coined the “one-halo, two-halo” terms that elegantly captured the complex process of nonlinear gravitational clustering, and obtained the first robust determination of merger rates of dark matter halos. She is a tireless champion for diversity in STEM and a concert violinist.