After the habilitation in 2005 (Théorie de l'indice local et applications) he became a professor at the University Paris VII (Denis Diderot) in 2007.

[4] In October 2024, it was reported that Ma would join Nankai University where he will serve as chair professor at the Chern Institute of Mathematics.

[1] The research themes of Ma encompass global analysis and local Atiyah–Singer–index theory (analytic Ray–Singer torsion, Eta forms, elliptic genera), Bergman kernels and geometric quantization.

[6] Ma was awarded together with George Marinescu the Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Prize in 2006 for the book "Holomorphic Morse inequalities and Bergman kernels".

[7] He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad 2010 (Geometric quantization on Kähler and symplectic Manifolds).