Wei Ji Ma

Weiji Ma is an Associate Professor at New York University in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Neural Science. He studies perceptual decision-making and working memory, and uses computational modeling in his work. He holds a PhD in physics from University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Biography

Ma grew up in Groningen, Netherlands. He received a Bachelor’s and Master’s of Science in Physics in 1996 and a Bachelor’s and Master’s of Science in Mathematics in 1997, both from the University of Groningen. He continued at the University of Groningen, where he received a PhD in Theoretical Physics in 2000. He transitioned into computational neuroscience as a post-doctoral fellow under Christof Koch at the California Institute of Technology from 2002-2004, and subsequently as a post-doctoral fellow under Alexandre Pouget at the University of Rochester until 2008. He received his first faculty position at in the Department of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in 2008 and remained there until 2013, when he took an Associate Professor position at New York University, where he has a dual appointment in the Center for Neural Science and the Department of Psychology.

Notable Publications

• Ma, W.J., Beck, J.M., Latham, P.E., & Pouget, A. (2006). Bayesian inference with probabilistic population codes. Nature Neuroscience, 9(11), 1432-1438.
• Ma, W.J. & Wilken, P. (2004). A detection theory account of change detection. Journal of Vision, 4(12), 1120-1135.
• Beck, J.M., Ma, W.J., Kiani, R., Hanks, T., Churchland, A.K., Roitman, J., ... Pouget, A. (2008). Probabilistic population codes for Bayesian decision making. Neuron, 60(6), 1142-1152.
• Körding, K.P., Beierholm, U., Ma, W.J., Quartz, S., Tenenbaum, J.B., & Shams, L. (2007). Causal inference in multisensory perception. PloS ONE, 2(9), e943.

Extracurriculars..?

• Ma is a co-founder and the current Chairman of the Board and CFO of the Rural China Education Foundation.
• ScAAN
• The Brain Piece
• growing up in science