Dr Ning Ma is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, with a joint academic appointment at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. His research develops AI-enabled speech, acoustic and wearable sensing technologies for healthcare, with a particular focus on unobtrusive digital biomarkers for longitudinal monitoring outside the clinic. His work seeks to extract clinically meaningful information from everyday physiological signals, including speech and voice, breathing sounds, sleep acoustics and wearable sensor data, and integrate these signals through multimodal AI.
Ning is Principal Investigator on several UKRI-funded projects and has authored more than 70 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He served as Lead Area Chair for ISCA INTERSPEECH in 2024 and 2025. He co-leads the NIHR Speech Technology Working Group, bringing together researchers, clinicians, and patient and public partners to accelerate the clinical translation of speech technologies.
He is also Co-Director for Healthcare Data and AI at the Insigneo Institute for in silico Medicine and Sheffield Theme Lead for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning within the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR).