[2] In 2011, he was awarded a PhD degree of Earth System Science and GIScience from University of Twente with his dissertation "Ontology Spectrum for Geological Data Interoperability".

[2] In early 2012, Ma joined the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as a postdoctorate fellow, with financial supports from the Sloan Foundation and NSF.

[3] At RPI, he received intensive training of data science methods and semantic technologies, and he participated and led several research projects.

In 2016 and 2017 Ma was an affiliate scientist with MILES - Managing Idaho's Landscapes for Ecosystem Services project,[10] where he contributed to the cyberinfrastructure development.

[16] In 2020 and 2021, Ma led a team of researchers from four U.S. universities and received a multi-million grant from NSF to conduct cross-disciplinary data science studies on climate change, ecology, biology, socioeconomics, and public health.