Dr. Ma has engaged in transmission electron microscopy for 30 years and mainly focuses on crystallography of complex compounds, mechanism of pitting initiation of steels and topological domains in ferroelectric oxides. Currently, he is the vice president of the Chinese Electron Microscopy Society. He also works as the director of Solids Atomic Imaging Division, Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science.
By engineering strain at the nanoscale, Dr. Ma discovered the full flux-closures in ferroelectric PbTiO3 films, mediated by tensile strain on a GdScO3 substrate. The results provide a new similarity between ferroelectric and ferromagnet, and extend the potential of employing epitaxial strain for modulating ferroelectric domain patterns (Science 2015). He fabricated a lead-free perovskite nanostructure array with giant linear strain gradient and extremely low elastic energy (Nature Communications 2017). More recently, Dr. Ma unmasks, at the atomic-scale, the mechanism of chloride-induced passivity breakdown which is known to occur in various metallic materials (Nature Communications 2018).
Dr. Ma has published more than 250 papers with citation 3000 by others. He received the ISI Citation Classic Awards in 2000, and the first-class prize by the State-Committee of Education in 1993. He was awarded the Research Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1995, and National Natural Science Foundation of China for distinguished scientists in 2003. Recently, he was awarded the K.H.Kuo Award for distinguished scientist (2016), and Lin-Zhao Qian Awards of Chinese Electron Microscopy Society (2018).