Eric Ma

Principal Data Scientist at Moderna Therapeutics

Eric Ma is a Senior Principal Data Scientist at Moderna Therapeutics, where he leads the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research team. His role focuses on accelerating scientific research and innovation, particularly in areas such as mRNA design, protein engineering, and lipid nanoparticle chemistry.1 2 3 He has been with Moderna since July 2021, initially serving as a Principal Data Scientist before being promoted to his current position in April 2024.3 4

Educational Background

Eric earned his PhD in Biological Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), defending his thesis in 2017. Prior to that, he completed various research roles, including as a Junior Specialist and Graduate Student at MIT's Voigt Lab.1 2 3

Professional Experience

Before joining Moderna, Eric worked at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) from September 2017 to June 2021. There, he focused on data science and statistical learning, employing Bayesian methods to enhance drug discovery processes. His experience also includes serving as an Insight Health Data Fellow in 2017.1 3 4

Contributions and Open Source Work

Eric is an active contributor to the open-source community, having developed tools such as pyjanitor, a Python library for data cleaning, and nxviz, a visualization package for NetworkX. He is also part of the core development teams for NetworkX and PyMC.2 4 His commitment to education is evident through his involvement in teaching workshops and seminars on machine learning and deep learning.3 4

Personal Philosophy

Eric's personal motto reflects his belief in responsibility and contribution: "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked," a quote from the Gospel of Luke.2 4

Overall, Eric Ma's work at Moderna exemplifies a blend of advanced data science techniques with practical applications in biomedical research, contributing significantly to the field of medicine through innovative approaches.