Jia Liu

When doctors implant anything into a patient’s body, there’s a risk that the immune system will reject it. To reduce or even eliminate that risk, Jia Liu, 34, has developed flexible nanoelectronics with physical and chemical properties that mimic biological tissue. One of his designs, a stretchable mesh, could be implanted in the brain to allow scientists to safely track electrical activity from the same neurons for years, Liu says. And there are other possibilities too, he adds: “When integrated with developing tissues such as organoids, it can grow together with the developing tissue, continuously monitoring the tissue-wide activities at single-cell resolution.”