Chengfu Ma studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC, Hefei, China) from 2007 to 2011 for his Bachelor's degree. After his one-year volunteer teaching program in Ningxia, China, he returned to USTC in 2012 for his PhD. In 2017, he obtained from USTC his PhD degree in Engineering on “Mechanical characterization at the nanoscale based on contact-resonance atomic force microscopy” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jiaru Chu and Dr. Yuhang Chen. During his PhD study, he visited the University of Göttingen (Germany) for one year from 2016 to 2017 and worked there under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Konrad Samwer and Prof. Dr. Walter Arnold on local internal friction measurement of metallic glasses by using the contact-resonance atomic force microscopy. From December 2017, he worked at USTC as a postdoc and then as a research associate on the subject of advanced dynamic atomic force microscopy for mechanical characterization and subsurface imaging.

From June 2022, he joined the group of Prof. Dr. Gianaurelio Cuniberti as a postdoc at the TU Dresden on the subject of multi-asperity contact and friction with atomic force microscopy together with Dr. Enrico Gnecco.