Xiaoxiao Helen Ma, Ph.D.

Helen is a Licensing Officer in the Technology Transfer Office (TTO) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her portfolio focuses on engineering and software inventions. She identifies, evaluates, and supports technologies with the potential to establish new startup companies. She also works with startups through the UMass Amherst I-Corps program and other campus entrepreneurship programs.

Prior to joining the TTO, Helen did multi-disciplinary research and development in the life science tools and diagnostics industry for seven years. She is an inventor herself: her previous R&D focused on the fluidic technologies and genomic/proteomic sequencing technologies, leading to multiple patent applications and contributing to innovative products (e.g., NextSeqTM 1000/2000). She was an engineer and tech lead for both Illumina, a corporation leading the genomic sequencing industry, and Quantum-Si, a startup company that went public in 2021. She enjoys working with inventors from a variety of disciplines and collaborators in the business and legal fields to bring ideas to products, both in industrial and academic settings. 

She received her Ph.D. and postdoc training at University of California, Los Angeles, researching microfluidic platform for molecular imaging tracer synthesis. She earned her B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Zhejiang University.