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I am Ka Wai Ma. Right, as you can tell from my name, I come from Hong Kong. I received doctoral training from the University of California, Riverside, with a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology. After my Ph.D. work on Type III secreted virulence factors, I moved to the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Germany as a postdoc. During that time, I studied plant microbiota and tried to understand principles governing plant-microbiota homeostasis. Specifically, I want to know how plant-microbiota homeostasis is coordinated through the activation and suppression of immunity. The lab used multiomic approaches such as transcriptome and 16S-based amplicon sequencing to understand the molecular basis of plant-microbiota interaction. I joined the Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology (IPMB) as an Assistant Research Fellow last year in December (https://ipmb.sinica.edu.tw/en/people/ipmb_researchers/ma-ka-wai). I work with microbes everyday but most of the time, I do not know what I am working with.