Le Yang

Under the esteemed guidance of Professor Sir Richard Friend at the University of Cambridge, Le Yang made a breakthrough discovery of a new emission mechanism in novel materials and has developed the ultra-high efficiency OLEDs, holding the record solution-processable efficiency to date. These OLEDs have tremendous potential for printable and flexible display technology. Along this line, Yang continues her efforts in optoelectronic research with new discoveries on energy up-conversion using organic molecules in the pipeline, generating value for stable, sustainable energy-efficient use cases.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yang and her team built the capabilities for an in-situ wellness/health monitoring sensing system from scratch. She names the prototype WISH (Wearable Integrated Sensors for Health), a small plaster-like electronic device on skin, to non-invasively and in real-time measure biochemicals continuously. Most wearable sensors on the market focus on physical and gradually electrophysiological parameters. There is a lack of non-invasive real-time continuous ways to monitor our biochemical parameters. This is the gap she is targeting in this digital era of smart monitoring. The Yang lab’s WISH prototype features a miniaturized, comfortable, and unobtrusive sensor that measures multiple organic molecules present on our skin concurrently as indicators, and the output can be read wirelessly from the user’s phone, achieving anyone-anytime-anywhere sensing.

Beyond daily lifestyle monitoring, this technology opens up avenues for early disease detection (and intervention), abnormal warnings, personalized healthcare, remote healthcare management and can couple with other emerging technologies such as digital twin, quantum sensing, edge computing, synthetic biology, and AI-driven analytics.