Arriving in July 2027, Will Ma is an associate professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell Tech and the Cornell David A. Duffield College of Engineering.
Ma’s research focuses on decision-making under uncertainty, online algorithms, and AI agents for operations research. He has been ranked as one of the very most prolific scholars in operations research and management science, with recognized contributions to a broad range of areas: revenue management, online matching, inventory management, randomized rounding, prophet inequalities, learning theory, distributional uncertainty, e-commerce fulfillment, assortment optimization, stochastic knapsack, neural network verification, and real-world deployments of operations research.
Algorithms from his research have been deployed at companies including Alibaba, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Dream11. Before joining Cornell Tech, Ma was the Roderick H. Cushman Associate Professor at Columbia Business School and earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His industry experience includes roles at Google, Jane Street, and Percepta.ai. He also founded a startup focused on strategy games and was previously a professional poker player.
His research has been recognized by numerous awards, and he has advised students who have won paper competitions and obtained top faculty positions.