Professor Shiming Zhang

Wearable Bioelectronics: Materials, Devices, and AI-Embedded Hardware-Software Co-Design

Abstract

In 1977, Shirakawa and colleagues made a groundbreaking breakthrough in organic semiconductor research, earning them the Nobel Prize in 2000. In 2002, Berggren and colleagues reported organic electrochemical transistors based on the mixed-conducting organic semiconductor PEDOT:PSS. This enabled the development of stable mixed-conducting devices that operate at room temperature and in aqueous environments, marking the start of a new era in bioelectronics. However, mismatches between mixed-conducting organic semiconductors and the human body - such as environmental compatibility, mechanical properties, and dimensionality - have hindered further progress in wearable bioelectronics. In this talk, I will present how our team, through molecular, polymer, and supramolecular co-design methods, discovered macroscopic semiconducting behavior in bulky hydrogels. I will show how these supramolecular gel semiconductors and new device concepts provide a new foundation, and why AI-embedded hardware-software co-design is needed for next-generation wearable bioelectronics, supported by illustrative examples.

Biography

Dr. Shiming Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Bioelectronics at HKU Electrical and Electronic Engineering and an affiliated faculty member at HKU SBME, where he leads the Wearable, Intelligent, and Soft Electronics (WISE) research group. He earned his PhD with the highest honor in Canada as a Vanier Canada Scholar from Ecole Polytechnique, Universite de Montreal. He spent three years at UCLA as a postdoctoral scholar and group leader in the Center for Minimally Invasive Therapeutics in bioelectronics and was promoted to an affiliated faculty member at the Terasaki Institute at UCLA before moving to Hong Kong. His research focuses on the scientific understanding of charge transport in emerging mixed ion-electron conducting materials and on designing new mixed-conducting devices for bioelectronics, including soft electronics, biosensors, and biocomputing. His research team discovered macroscopic semiconducting behavior in bulky hydrogels, leading to a paradigm shift from two-dimensional thin film electronics to three-dimensional bulky gel electronics and laying the material foundation for next-generation soft and wearable electronics.