Zhongyuan Ma is a professor of Physical Electronics at the School of Electronic Science and Engineering at Nanjing University. She received her PhD in condensed matter physics from the Department of Physics, Nanjing University, in 2002. She has visited and studied at Ecole Polytechnique in France, the Technical University of Munich in Germany, the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, and the University of Hamburg in Germany. She is also the director of the Institute of Solid State Physics and Nanostructures and the director of the Center for Hybrid Nanostructures at the University of Hamburg in Germany.