Principal Investigator, Assistant Professor

College of Future Technology, Peking University

Director, Digital Life Simulation Lab

Director of Platform IV, Multimodal Trans-scale Biomedical Imaging Facility

Deputy Director, Department of Big Data and Biomedical AI, Peking University

Biography:

Dr. Lei Ma is a principal investigator at the College of Future Technology, Peking University. His research focuses on Digital Life, with the goal of building executable and verifiable computational models of biological systems across scales. Before joining Peking University, he worked at Autodesk Research, where he contributed to the development of core industrial simulation software engines. In 2019, he founded the Life Simulation Research Center at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, leading early efforts in digital organism modeling.

His work has appeared in leading journals including Nature Computational Science (Cover), Cell Research (Cover), Nature Communications, and National Science Review. He is a recipient of the Beijing Outstanding Youth Fund (2024), and has been recognized as a BAAI Scholar (2025), Berggruen Fellow (2025), and Bayer Investigator (2026).

Career

· 2026–Present 

Deputy Director, Department of Big Data and Biomedical AI, Peking University

· 2022–PresentPrincipal Investigator, National Biomedical Imaging Center, Peking University

· 2021–PresentDirector of Platform IV, Multimodal Trans-scale Biomedical Imaging Facility

· 2019–2025Founder / Former Deputy Director, Life Simulation Research Center, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)

Research Directions

· Executable digital life models integrating brain–body–environment interactions

· Multi-scale biological system modeling and digital organ construction

· AI-driven integration of multimodal biomedical imaging data

· Large-scale neural simulation and computational neuroscience platforms

Teaching

· Biomedical Data Visualization (Graduate Course)

· Introduction to Digital Life (Undergraduate Course)

Selected Publications

·  An integrative data-driven model simulating C. elegans brain, body and environment interactions. Mengdi Zhao#, Ning Wang#, Xinrui Jiang, Xiaoyang Ma, Haixin Ma, Gan He, Kai Du, Lei Ma*, Tiejun Huang.

Nature Computational Science, 2024.(Cover article).

·  System-level time computation and representation in the suprachiasmatic nucleus revealed by large-scale calcium imaging and machine learning. Zichen Wang, Jing Yu, Muyue Zhai, Zehua Wang, Kaiwen Sheng, Yu Zhu, Tianyu Wang, Mianzhi Liu, Lu Wang, Miao Yan, Jue Zhang, Ying Xu, Xianhua Wang, Lei Ma*, Wei Hu*, Heping Cheng*. Cell Research, 2024. (Cover article).

·  A GPU-based computational framework that bridges Neuron simulation and Artificial Intelligence.Yichen Zhang#, Gan He#, Lei Ma#, Xiaofei Liu, JJ Johannes Hjorth, Alexander Kozlov, Yutao He, Shenjian Zhang, Jeanette Hellgren Kotaleski, Yonghong Tian, Sten Grillner, Kai Du*, Tiejun Huang. Nature Communications, 2023.

·  An initiative on digital nephrology: the Kidney Imageomics Project. Fangxu Zhou, Zehua Li, Haifeng Li, Yao Lu, Linjia Cheng, Ying Zhang, Zichen Wang, Jing Nie, Heping Cheng, Bin Dong*, Lei Ma*, Li Yang*. National Science Review, 2025.

·  Learn to Enhance Sparse Spike Streams.Liwen Hu, Yijia Guo, Mianzhi Liu, Yiming Fan, Rui Ma, Shengbo Chen, Lei Ma*, Tiejun Huang. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2026.

·  HCUC: Combining holistic consistency and uniqueness for PET/CT multi-modal segmentation. Yu Cai, Zhuo Yang, Lei Ma*.Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2025.

·  Trans-scale bioimaging and integrative biology: on the debut of China National Biomedical Imaging Center. Liangyi Chen*, Lei Ma*, Hui Dai, Quansheng Du, Yujie Sun, Heping Cheng*. Science China Life Sciences, 68(12): 3495–3498, 2025.

·  Embedded prompt tuning: Towards enhanced calibration of pretrained models for medical images. Wenqiang Zu#, Shenghao Xie#, Qing Zhao#, Guoqi Li, Lei Ma*. Medical Image Analysis, 2024.

·  Accurate registration of cross-modality geometry via consistent clustering. Mingyang Zhao, Xiaoshui Huang, Jingen Jiang, Luntian Mou, Dong-Ming Yan*, Lei Ma*.IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2023.

·  GraphReg: Dynamical point cloud registration with geometry-aware graph signal processing. Mingyang Zhao, Lei Ma*, Xiaohong Jia, Dong-Ming Yan*, Tiejun Huang. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 2022.