Professor Stephanie Ma obtained her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of British Columbia in Canada. She then graduated with a Ph.D. degree from The University of Hong Kong (HKU) with an outstanding ranking and was awarded the best Ph.D. thesis of that year. Since then, she has been working at The University of Hong Kong where she is currently a Professor and Associate Director (Knowledge Exchange and Global) in the School of Biomedical Sciences, and Assistant Dean (Innovation and Technology Transfer) at the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine (HKUMed). Professor Ma is also a Principal Investigator at the State Key Laboratory of Liver Research at HKU. Her research interest is in exploiting stemness as a cancer cell vulnerability. Her team is dedicated to better understand how a less differentiated and more stemness state in cancer can contribute to therapy resistance and tumor recurrence, with a particular interest in hepatocellular carcinoma. In her field, she has been listed by Clarivate as a top 1% most-cited scholar (2010-2018) and by Stanford University as a top 2% scientist worldwide (2022-2024). She is the recipient of the 2014 Croucher Innovation Award, 2017 University of British Columbia Alumni Builder Award, 2021 Research Grants Council of Hong Kong - Research Fellow, 2023 Croucher Senior Research Fellowship and 2022/23 HKU Outstanding Researcher Award. She is a Founding Member and current Vice-President of the Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences.