Dr. Ma obtained her Ph.D. on Microbiology at China Agricultural University in 1996. Since then, she has worked in the State Key Laboratory of Agricultural Biotechnology, China Agricultural University. She has been a visiting postdoc at the School of Medicine, University of Connecticut from 2000 to 2004 and Wake Forest University from 2005 to 2008. Her research interests focus on the molecular mechanism of bacterial biofilm formation, microbial information exchange and interaction and programmed cell death and bacterial biofilm formation and development.