Yanyuan Ma is a Chinese-American mathematical statistician whose research interests include semiparametric models, dimension reduction, selection bias, and skew-symmetric distributions.
[1][2] She began her doctoral studies at Stanford University, but switched after a year to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,[2] where she completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1999.
[1] Her dissertation, Studies in Matrix Perturbation and Robust Statistics, was jointly supervised by mathematician and computer scientist Alan Edelman and by statistician Marc G.
[3] After working in industry, and then as a postdoctoral researcher beginning in 2002, she took an assistant professorship at Texas A&M University in 2004.
[2] Ma was named as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2017, "for influential and original contributions to the development of dimension reduction techniques, and to semiparametric theory and methodology".