Damien Ma is the director and Maurice R. Greenberg Director's Chair of Carnegie China, an East Asia-based research center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with its office in Singapore. His work covers China's political economy, energy and U.S.–China relations (Source: carnegieendowment.org).
Background
According to his Carnegie biography, Ma built the Macro Polo think tank at the Paulson Institute (MacroPolo), the China practice at Eurasia Group, and a global experiential education program at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He has taught as adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins SAIS and at Kellogg, and has written or edited books on China's political economy and on its energy and environmental challenges (Source: carnegieendowment.org).
Work on AI
With Binyi Yang, Ma wrote "Who's Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race?" (September 23, 2026), Carnegie China's AI Talent v3.0 edition of the Global AI Talent Tracker that MacroPolo had run. It found 40.6% of the 2025 NeurIPS author cohort working in China and 34.2% in the United States, against 27.1% and 46.4% for the 2022 cohort, in a sample of the 10,280 of 25,677 unique authors with complete career histories (Who's Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race? (Ma and Yang, Carnegie China, 2026)). His other 2026 Carnegie commentary includes a July 31 piece on whether data centers can absorb China's excess renewable-energy capacity and a May 28 piece on the Trump–Xi summit, "Trump and Xi Are Angling for Three Years of Stability" (Source: carnegieendowment.org).
Relationships
- related: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — director of Carnegie China
- related: MacroPolo — built the think tank at the Paulson Institute
- related: Who's Ahead in the Global AI Talent Race? (Ma and Yang, Carnegie China, 2026) — co-author
- related: Binyi Yang — co-author
- related: AI Talent Flows, US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics