(Philadelphia, PA) - Minghong Ma, PhD, has been named Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Her research focuses on how the nose and brain encode and decode olfactory information, which allows the mammalian olfactory system to detect and discriminate thousands of odors in the environment. To support her research, she has received the Whitehall Foundation Award and a grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, one of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Ma's work has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Methods and Frontiers in Chemosensory Research, among other journals.

Dr. Ma's educational career began at Beijing University in China, where she received her BS degree in Physiology and Biophysics. She went on to earn her MS degree in Biophysics from the Chinese Academy of Science, also in Beijing, and her PhD (with distinction) in Neuroscience from Columbia University in New York City. She completed a fellowship in Neuroscience at Yale University. Prior to her appointment at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Dr. Ma was an Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Neurobiology at Yale University.

She is a member of the Society for Neuroscience and the Association for Chemoreception Sciences.


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