Professor Shiming Zhang Named Finalist for Prestigious Falling Walls Award

HKU Professor Shiming Zhang has been named a finalist for the Falling Walls 2026 Science Breakthrough of the Year, a prestigious award given by the Berlin-based Falling Walls Foundation to scientists breaking down the barriers between science and society.

Professor Zhang is best known for his work on soft, biocompatible 3D transistors, a revolutionary new technology with applications in medical devices, bioelectronics, and other frontier fields.

Traditional silicon-based transistors are often too rigid to effectively integrate into soft tissue, posing serious problems for designers of next-gen wearables and biocompatible devices.

Professor Zhang and his team at the Wearable, Intelligent, Soft Electronics Lab (HKU-WISE) solved this longstanding problem by taking a fundamentally different path: developing soft, hydrogel semiconductors with inherently tissue-like properties.

The project took five years, with the resulting research featured on the cover of Science in November 2025.

The Falling Walls Foundation is not the only organisation to recognise Professor Zhang’s groundbreaking work in this field. China’s Science and Technology Review named it one of the country’s top 10 scientific advances in 2025. The influential Shanghai-based news site Guancha also named Professor Zhang one of its “Science and Technology Figures” of 2026.

In July, Professor Zhang and his team published a review article outlining design principles for hydrogel semiconductors in Nature Materials. Moving forward, in addition to improving our understanding of the underlying physical laws behind the technology, he is also working to outline ethical standards related to the transistors.

“Technology moves faster than regulations,” he says. “We have this potential goldmine, but the question we have to answer now is: what do we do with it?”