Dr. Hongyan Ma is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at MST. He received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2013. Dr. Ma joined Missouri S&T in October 2015 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering and granted tenure in September 2021. Before joining S&T, he was a postdoctoral fellow at HKUST for two and a half years.

Dr. Ma is the member of American Concrete Institute (ACI), American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and the American Ceramic Society (ACerS). He is currently directing the Smart and Functional Construction Materials Lab at MST, and serving as an editorial board member for two journals, associate member of ACI Material Science Committee (236) and Nonotechnology Committee (241), grant evaluator for Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and referee for more than 15 reputable journals.

Dr. Ma has been devoting himself into the research and development of construction materials and functional materials for more than ten years. His previous research interests include hydration kinetics of (blended) cementitious materials, microstructure characterization and modeling, multi-scale modeling of transport properties of concrete, novel construction and repair materials, deterioration mechanisms of concrete, molecular dynamics simulation of C-S-H, and acoustics-based NDT. His research is currently focusing on magnesia-phosphate cement (MPC) and MPC-based functional materials, nano- and biological technologies in construction, phase change materials and composites, as well as optics-based NDTs.

CREE Research Investigator