Terence P. Ma, Ph.D., M.B.A. is assistant dean for assessment and quality improvement and clinical professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine. He is responsible for developing, maintaining, and managing plans for continuous quality improvement for medical student education, as well as monitoring and maintaining materials for accreditation with LCME and SACS. Ma will be providing oversight and guidance to faculty and staff working with medical student academic performance assessment and curriculum evaluation. He will also be teaching clinical anatomy.

His work focuses on the issue of how “we” know that students “learned” what we taught. He has concentrated on learner outcomes tracking and program outcomes analysis. As part of this effort, he has been working on the area of competency-based medical education (CBME) and its application to preclerkship education.

Currently, Ma is heavily involved with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Ma published both IEEE recommended practices and technical standards on defining competencies. He is currently part of the IEEE learning and employment record (LER) workgroup developing recommended practices in that field. He co-chairs the Research and Alignment Workgroup and the Health Professions Education Curriculum Exchange Working Group for MedBiquitous, the Health Professions standards setting organization. Ma is also the chair for the Open Competency Network, an international working group, which focuses on the organizational and technical infrastructure to improve the use of competencies to power the talent ecosystem at scale.

Ma received his undergraduate degree in behavioral biology from Johns Hopkins University, his Master of Business Administration with a concentration in Information Technology Management from Western Governors University, and his Ph.D. in Anatomy from Wayne State University School of Medicine. He completed his postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health, and over the course of his distinguished career has held varying positions from a funded research scientist and faculty member, to associate dean and chief information officer. Ma has worked at multiple allopathic (MD) and osteopathic (DO) schools around the country and has helped start three new medical schools.