Bin Ma

Professor Bin Ma was a postdoc at University of Waterloo in 1999-2000. During 2000-2008 he had been an Assistant Professor and later an Associate Professor and a Canada Research Chair at University of Western Ontario. He was a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in 2006-2007.

Professor Bin Ma's research interests are in bioinformatics algorithms and software. He studies the mathematical problems that are abstracted from molecular biology, and develops algorithms and computer software for biologists to use. In particular, his work in recent years is focused on two areas: homology search and mass spectrometry data analysis. Homology search finds similarities in DNA and protein sequence database. This is a basic task that modern biologists need to perform regularly. The large size of the database raised the requirement for extremely efficient searching algorithm. Together with Professor Ming Li and other coworkers, he has developed the PatternHunter program for homology search.