Bing Ma, PhD, focuses her research on understanding the intricate interplay between gut microbes and host health to develop live biotherapeutics.   

Dr. Ma’s laboratory is at the forefront of omics technologies. Her research utilizes a comprehensive omics approach, investigating the microbiome, metabolome, and metatranscriptome to decode microbial signals. She employs advanced techniques, including Bulk and Single RNA-seq, to study gene activity in the host and applies integrative modeling to understand these interactions.  

This research has a multitude of applications, spanning various gut conditions, including “leaky gut” in preterm infants, early-life immune development influenced by the gut microbiome, gut microbiome-mediated chronic visceral pain relief in irritable bowel syndrome, and the gut microbiome-driven alloimmune response that determined solid organ transplantation outcomes.   

Dr. Ma received her PhD in Computational Biology with a specialization in omics technologies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She joined the Institute of Genome Sciences as a postdoctoral fellow in 2008 and has been on the faculty since 2014.