Minghong Ma

Minghong Ma is a Professor of Neuroscience at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the neural mechanisms of olfactory processing and its connections to cognition, emotion, and disease states.

• Ph.D. in Neuroscience, Columbia University (1997)
• MS in Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1991)
• BS in Biophysics, Peking University (1988)

Research interests include

• Network connections between olfactory system and non-olfactory brain regions (prefrontal cortex, amygdala)
• Mind-body interactions via respiration and behavioral states
• Sniffing's role in sensory salience coding
• Neural bases of interbrain synchrony in social mice
• Olfactory dysfunction in neuropsychiatric disorders

Technical approaches integrate ex vivo/in vivo electrophysiology, optogenetics, chemogenetics, fiber photometry, neural circuit tracing, and machine learning for behavioral classification.

Recent publications examine depression-related striatal circuits, olfactory-cognitive interactions, neuroimmune impacts on olfaction, and respiratory-behavioral correlations using multi-omics and computational approaches.