Chung-Pei Ma

Chung-Pei Ma, a theoretical cosmologist and astrophysicist, received both her undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2002, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and an assistant and associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, where she won the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Ma is an avid violin player and was an exchange student at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston while studying cosmic strings and theoretical cosmology at MIT. She was the first prize winner in the Taiwan National Violin Competition in 1983, and is the cosmology scientific editor for the Astrophysical Journal.