Yilong Ma received his PhD degree in biomedical engineering from McGill University in Canada in 1998. He has developed specialty in the field of MRI and PET imaging during his doctoral study at McConnell Brain Imaging Center at Montreal Neurological Institute. He joined the Functional Brain Image Laboratory in 1999 as an assistant investigator at the Feinstein Institute. He is currently a research associate professor in the Departments of Neurology and Medicine at New York University School of Medicine.

Dr. Ma has worked on the development and application of brain imaging methodology in the study of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. The overall objective is to identify and validate imaging biomarkers that can accurately describe disease onset and progression in patients as well as evaluate brain responses to experimental therapeutics. Over the last 5 years, Dr. Ma has implemented a series of innovative analytic methods to map and quantify abnormality in pre- and post-synaptic dopaminergic function in PET images and to detect anatomical change in MRI data. He is also interested in performing brain atrophy correction in PET scans using MRI data. At present, he is exploring novel techniques using both univariate and multivariate statistics. In addition to serving on an NIH Study Section, he is a regular reviewer for many professional journals in the field.