[1] Ma earned a bachelor's degree in management from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 2004.
She went to Michigan State University for graduate study in statistics, earning a master's degree there in 2006 and completing her Ph.D. in 2011.
[1] Her dissertation, Theory of Spline Regression with Applications to Time Series, Longitudinal, and Categorical Data, and Data with Jumps, was supervised by Lijian Yang.
[3] She was named to the 2022 class of Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, for "outstanding contributions to statistical methodology and theory; especially in non-parametric and semi-parametric machine learning methods for massive datasets, and for excellent services to the statistical editorial boards and to the profession".
[5] She was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2023.