VICE PRESIDENT
Professor Yin-Zhe Ma is a Full Professor and Head of the Astrophysics Group at Stellenbosch University, where he also holds the Stellenbosch-Groningen Joint Research Chair in Computational Astronomy. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University (2006), Master’s from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2008), and PhD from the University of Cambridge (2011). He previously held positions as a CITA National Fellow at the University of British Columbia (2011–2014), Research Associate at the University of Manchester (2014–2015), and served at the University of KwaZulu-Natal as Senior Lecturer (2015–2017), Associate Professor (2018–2021), and Full Professor (2021–2023). His expertise lies in radio astronomy, cosmology, and theoretical astrophysics. He is a core member of several major international collaborations including the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), Planck science team, HERA, CMB Stage-4, and LSST (Vera C. Rubin Observatory). With the Planck team, he received the 2018 Gruber Cosmology Prize.
Professor Ma has published over 140 papers, with more than 29,000 citations and an h-index of 49. He has received the NSFC Oversea Scholar grant and several grants from the South Africa National Research Foundation. In 2022, he was elected to the Academy of Science of South Africa.
Within AfAS, he serves as Vice President and member of the Science Committee. He is also a Council Member and Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa. His awards and recognitions include:
- Gruber Cosmology Prize (2018)
- Vice-Chancellor Research Award, UKZN (2018)
- Elected Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (2022)
- UKZN Top 5 Most Cited Researchers Award (2022)
- Council Member (2022) and Fellow (2023) of the Royal Society of South Africa
- NRF B3-rated Researcher (2023–2028)