Yujia Zhang wins iCANX Young Scientist Award
2025 EPFL/Yujia Zhang CC BY SA
Yujia Zhang, head of the Laboratory for Bio-Iontronics in the School of Engineering, was recently honored with a Young Scientist Award at the 2025 iCANX Global Summit in Hong Kong.
iCANX is an international science talent forum that aims to advance the science and technology industry by encouraging innovation, facilitating the growth of young scientists, and promoting high-tech investment. This year's event was held from October 10-21 in Hong Kong.
There, Bio-Iontronics Lab head Yujia Zhang received an iCANX Young Scientist Award, which aims to promote and highlight the leading young scientists worldwide.
A tenure-track assistant professor at EPFL since fall 2024, Zhang is exploring a new frontier in biomedicine with dropletronics: droplet-based systems that use ions as signal carriers to interface seamlessly with biological tissues. He has developed a fabrication process for ‘dropletronic devices’, which begins with submerging positively and negatively charged hydrogel droplets in an oily solution. This forms a lipid coating around each droplet, so that they can be combined to form batteries, transistors, logic circuits, and memory storage devices. Ultimately, Zhang hopes to use 3D-printed networks of droplets to create 3D multifunctional synthetic tissues for soft implants and biointerfaces.