Department of Biomedical Engineering Professor Mikyung Shin Named 2026 Asian Young Scientist Fellow

Professor Mikyung Shin of the Department of Biomedical Engineering has been named one of twelve recipients of the 2026 Asian Young Scientist Fellowship (AYSF), the fellowship announced on September 4, 2026. Professor Shin was selected in the Physical Sciences category as an interdisciplinary researcher working across physical and life sciences.

The Asian Young Scientist Fellowship is a privately funded program that supports early-career researchers across Asia in pursuing creative, transformative science. Candidates must be within ten years of completing their doctoral degree and hold a full-time academic position in the region. Each fellow receives $100,000 over two years, along with access to the AYSF's academic network and annual conference, to be held this year on November 9, 2026, at the University of Hong Kong.

The AYSF Committee recognized Professor Shin for her contributions to the development of adhesive and electroconductive hydrogels for muscle tissue repair and selected her to support her next research direction: the exploration of adhesive and conductive hydrogel fillers designed to have dual functions with inhibition of brain tumor recurrence and enhanced neuronal regeneration.

Professor Shin's research addresses a long-standing challenge in bioelectronics and tissue engineering — conventional implantable materials, such as stiff elastomers and rigid metal electrodes, are often far stiffer than the soft, dynamic tissues they are meant to interface with. Her lab has instead developed a series of tissue-adhesive, electrically conductive hydrogels designed to closely match the mechanical properties of biological tissue while enabling both electrical stimulation and signal recording for tissue repair.

Among her group's key achievements is a multilayered adhesive bioelectronic patch that adheres to beating cardiac tissue in under half a second without any external stimulus, reported in *Nature Electronics* (2023). Built from a fibrous self-healing polymer network, a stretchable liquid-metal conductive composite, and a mussel-inspired adhesive hydrogel layer, the patch conformally follows the heart's motion and has enabled stable, long-term electrocardiogram monitoring and precise cardiac mapping in freely moving animal models.

Her group also developed an injectable, gold-catalyzed hyaluronic acid hydrogel capable of forming an electrically conductive, tissue-adhesive gel in situ, reported in *Nature* (2023). Because the hydrogel can be delivered through a syringe directly into damaged muscle or nerve tissue, it allows immediate electrical bridging across an injury site — enabling closed-loop, robot-assisted rehabilitation in which real-time muscle signals trigger coordinated robotic support, and supporting accelerated tissue regeneration over the longer term.

Building on this body of work, Professor Shin's future research — the focus of her AYSF-supported project — will extend the group's expertise in adhesive, conductive hydrogels to the central nervous system. The goal is to engineer an injectable hydrogel filler that can be applied directly into the cavity left after surgical resection of a brain tumor. Unlike the peripheral nervous system, the adult brain has very limited capacity for spontaneous regeneration, and current treatments largely fail to address the loss of neural tissue itself.

▲ Figure 1. Representative previous research outcomes by Professor Mikyung Shin

regarding conductive and adhesive hydrogel interfaces and electrodes