Jerry Ma is an executive, technologist, and registered patent practitioner currently serving as Director of Emerging Technology at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Jerry hails from an industry background including management and senior technical roles at Facebook AI Research, Quora, and Hummingbird Regtech. He has overseen initiatives resulting in the world’s first public-domain superhuman Go bot and the first deep neural network to be trained on the known protein universe.

Jerry is an avid developer and scientist, publishing at venues such as ICML, ICLR, AAAI, and S&P. He has explored diverse topics including the mathematics of nonconvex optimization, quasi-linguistic structure in proteins and passwords, and energy-based neural modeling of atomic structures. As an educator, Jerry has taught computer science & mathematics in undergraduate, graduate, and professional settings.

Jerry earned an A.B. in Economics and the Classics from Harvard University.