Ma is the 2021 recipient of the Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building from the Cognitive Science Society.

A large portion of his academic work is devoted to the construction of Bayesian inference models which describe how an observer arrives at beliefs about things in the world from noisy information.

[7][8] A complementary line of inquiry is studying encoding strategies in working memory, specifically highlighting the relationships between the role of noisy representations of objects in the brain and the number that can be recalled correctly.

[10] In that capacity, he has been an expert witness, providing scientific testimony to the New York City Council Committees on Juvenile Justice & Courts and Legal Services on the issue of adolescent brain development.

[18][19][20] He also created and co-organizes the Growing Up in Science talk series[21] where he leads interviews and discussions on scientists’ personal maturation in academia.