Chung-Pei Ma

Chung-Pei Ma (Chinese: 馬中珮) is a Taiwaness-American astrophysicist and cosmologist. She is a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. She led the teams that discovered several of largest known black holes from 2011 to 2016.

Biography

Chung-Pei Ma was born in Taiwan. 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.^[1] 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.^[2]

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.^[3] 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.^[2] She led the team that discovered the largest known black holes in 2011.^[4][5]

Ma is the scientific editor in cosmology for The Astrophysical Journal.

Awards and honors

• 1987 – Phi Beta Kappa Society
• 1997 – Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy (American Astronomical Society)
• 1999 - Sloan Fellowship
• 2003 – Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award (American Physical Society)^[6]
• 2009 - American Physical Society Fellow
• 2012 - American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow,
• 2012 - Simons Foundation Fellow,

Selected publications

• Ma, Chung-Pei; Bertschinger, Edmund (December 1995). "Cosmological Perturbation Theory in the Synchronous and Conformal Newtonian Gauges". The Astrophysical Journal. 455: 7–25. doi:10.1086/176550. 
• Ma, Chung‐Pei; Fry, J. N. (10 November 2000). "Deriving the Nonlinear Cosmological Power Spectrum and Bispectrum from Analytic Dark Matter Halo Profiles and Mass Functions". The Astrophysical Journal. 543 (2): 503–513. doi:10.1086/317146. 
• Boylan-Kolchin, M.; Ma, C.-P.; Quataert, E. (1 January 2008). "Dynamical friction and galaxy merging time-scales". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 383 (1): 93–101. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.12530.x. 
• McConnell, Nicholas J.; Ma, Chung-Pei (20 February 2013). "Revisiting the Scaling Relations of Black Hole Masses and Host Galaxy Properties". The Astrophysical Journal. 764 (2): 184. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/764/2/184. 
• Ma, Chung-Pei; Caldwell, R. R.; Bode, Paul; Wang, Limin (10 August 1999). "The Mass Power Spectrum in Quintessence Cosmological Models". The Astrophysical Journal. 521 (1): L1–L4. doi:10.1086/312183. 
• Fakhouri, Onsi; Ma, Chung-Pei; Boylan-Kolchin, Michael (21 August 2010). "The merger rates and mass assembly histories of dark matter haloes in the two Millennium simulations". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 406 (4): 2267–2278. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.16859.x. 

References

External links

• Behemoth Black Hole Found in an Unlikely Place, accessed 08 April, 2016.
• Sarah Lewin, Surprise! Gigantic Black Hole Found in Cosmic Backwater, accessed 08 April, 2016.
• Dark Matter, the Other Universe, presentation by Ma, SETI Institute (video)