Xiaogang (Marshall) Ma

Xiaogang (Marshall) Ma is a data science and geoinformatics researcher at the University of Idaho (UI), United States. He is an assistant professor in the department of computer science at UI, and also affiliates with the department of geography and geological sciences and several research institutes and centers at the universityhttps://webpages.uidaho.edu/max/. 
==Education==
Marshall earned his B.Eng and Doctor of Engineering both from China University of Geosciences, Wuhan. His interest in geoinformatics was initiated by a few research projects he participated in when he was an undergraduate student of Land Resource Management. Before graduation he was awarded a scholarship for graduate study at the same university, where he finished a doctorate degree in Geoinformatics Engineering. As the degree was engineering-oriented, Marshall went forward for a science-oriented graduate study at ITC, University of Twente. He was awarded a PhD degree of Earth System Science and GIScience in 2011 with his PhD dissertation "Ontology Spectrum for Geological Data Interoperability"https://webapps.itc.utwente.nl/librarywww/papers_2011/phd/ma.pdf. In early 2012, Marshall joined the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as a postdoctoral fellow. At RPI, he received intensive training in data science methods and semantic technologies, and he participated and led several research projects. In 2014, Marshall was promoted to associate research scientist at RPI.
==Career==
Marshall's research addresses the gap between computer science and geoscience. At RPI, he took leadership roles for ontology development in the Global Change Information System of the U.S. Global Change Research Program and data science activities of the Deep Carbon Observatory. He also taught a data analytics course for the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. 
In 2016, Marshall joined the Department of Computer Science at University of Idaho (UI). He continued his research on data science and geoinformatics at UI, including knowledge graphs, open data, and algorithms for spatio-temporal analysis, and created several new courses related to data science and open data. In 2016 and 2017 Marshall was an affiliate scientist withe MILES - Managing Idaho's Landscapes for Ecosystem Services project, where he contributed to the cyberinfrastructure development. In 2018, he co-initiated the U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium (US2TS) and received sponsorship from NSF and the Sloan Foundation. Since 2017, he has worked intensively on the deep-time data science, and has been active in several research programs or initiatives, including the Deep-Time Data Infrastructure, the Deep-time Data Driven Discoveries, and the IUGS Deep-time Digital Earth.
==Awards==
*2021 Outstanding Early-Career Faculty, University of Idaho College of Engineering
*2018 SciTS Meritorious Contribution Award, Science of Team Science Conference
*2015 Andrei Borisovich Vistelius Research Award, International Association for Mathematical Geosciences 
*2014 Data Stewardship Award, International Council for Science World Data System
Category:Data scientists
Category:Chinese scientists 
Category:1980 births