Yao Ma received the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from National University of Singapore, in year 2000. His Ph.D thesis was on the diversity reception over fading channels and CDMA multiuser detection.

He took various academic, government and industrial positions since April 2000, including Member of Technical Staff at the Centre for Wireless Communications, Singapore, Post-doctorate Fellow at the ECE Department of the University of Toronto,
Assistant Professor at the ECpE Department of the Iowa State University,
Research Assistant Professor at the EE Department of the Wright State University,
Electronics Engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory,
and Senior Computer Scientist at Infoscitex Inc.
Since July 2015, he has been with Communication Technology Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colorado.
He has served as Project Leader of the Wireless Coexistence research since 2018.

His work covers general area of wireless communication and networks, with recent focus on spectrum sharing of 4G, 5G cellular and Wi-Fi networks, including theoretical development, simulation and modeling, and hardware programming and experiments. He has been an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology since 2004 and he was a former editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.