Xiaoli Ma has been elected to the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Board of Governors in the capacity of Member-at-Large for the 2022-2024 term. She is a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). 

When it was founded in 1948 as the Professional Group on Audio of the Institute of Radio Engineers — IEEE’s first society — the discipline of signal processing didn’t exist. Over the next few decades, this group evolved to become known as the IEEE Signal Processing Society, which now has more than 19,000 members through 170 chapters worldwide. The purpose of the SPS is to advance and disseminate state-of-the-art scientific information and resources; educate the signal processing community; and provide a venue for people to interact and exchange ideas.

Ma has actively served the IEEE and the SPS as an editor and a conference organizer for the past 20 years. She has worked on different technical committees for IEEE SPS and was a technical representative of the IEEE Signal Processing Regional Committee (Regions 1-6). Ma was presented with the Outstanding Service Award for her work as the local arrangements chair for the 2013 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing, which is a flagship conference of the SPS. She was elevated to the rank of IEEE Fellow in 2016.

Ma has been on the ECE faculty since 2006. Her research spans many different areas of signal processing and wireless communications, ranging from information theory to FPGA hardware implementation, which includes network performance analysis, transceiver designs for wireless time- and frequency-selective channels, Internet of Things, and performance analysis for blockchains. 

Ma was a co-director for the Georgia Tech Center of Excellence on UWB Technology (2012-2015) and a co-founder for a start-up company, Ratrix Technologies, LLC that develops revolutionary technology to maximize data throughput and spectral efficiency of wireless communication systems. She has published one book, three book chapters, 110 journal papers, and more than 170 peer-reviewed conference papers.