Prof. Jian Feng Ma is Full Professor at the Institute of Plant Science and Resources (IPSR), Okayama University, Japan. He received his Ph.D. in plant nutrition from Kyoto University, Japan in 1991 and did postdoctoral training at Suntory Institute for Bioorganic Research until 1995. In 1995, he joined Okayama University as an assistant professor and then moved to Kagawa University as an associate professor in 1999. In 2005, he became a full professor at the present institute.
Dr. Ma has been working on identifying transporters for mineral elements including essential, beneficial and toxic elements in plants, especially in rice. He also has been working on molecular tolerance mechanisms of aluminium stress for many years and identified many key tolerance genes, especially in rice and barley.
So far, his group has published more than 300 papers in international top journals including Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Plants, Nature Food, PNAs and Plant Cell. He was selected as the Top Author of ASPB in 2015 (one of nine top authors in Asia) and the Most Cited Researcher for 8 years since 2015. He has received many awards, the most significant being awarded Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Prize in 2006 and the Japan Academy Medals in 2006, the ASPB Corresponding Membership Award in 2016, the Japan Prize of Agricultural Science and the Yomiuri Prize of Agricultural Science in 2019, JSPP award (2022), National Medal with Purple Ribbon (2022), and Frontier Planet Prizes (2023).