Two Michigan Engineers Win $250,000 Sony-Nature Award for Wearable Sensors and Smart Polymers

Medical devices that sit at the boundary between electronics and human biology face a common problem: the body is wet, warm, and chemically reactive, while conventional electronics are dry, rigid, and designed for stable environments. Two University of Michigan Engineering professors have spent their careers developing materials and systems that bridge that gap, and their work has now been recognized with one of the field's most substantial new prizes.

Xiwen Gong and Cindy Chestek are among the three recipients of the second-ever Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature, a $250,000 prize jointly administered by Sony and the journal Nature. The award, which specifically recognizes women working at the intersection of science and technology, provides funding that flows directly into the researchers' laboratory programs.

Xiwen Gong: Wearable Sensors That Conform to Skin

Gong, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, works on semiconducting polymers - organic electronic materials that can be deposited as thin, flexible films. Her laboratory's focus is health monitoring: designing polymer-based sensors that can be worn against the skin to track physiological signals including glucose levels, electrolytes, and other biomarkers present in sweat.

The challenge in this space is not simply making electronics flexible. It is making them stable over time in a biological environment while maintaining the electrical performance needed to detect trace quantities of clinically relevant molecules. Conventional inorganic semiconductors degrade when exposed to sweat and mechanical deformation. Gong's group develops organic materials with the electronic properties needed for sensitive detection alongside the mechanical and chemical durability that wearable use demands.

Continuous, non-invasive monitoring of metabolic biomarkers would substantially change how certain chronic conditions are managed. Real-time sweat glucose tracking, for instance, could supplement or eventually complement blood-based glucose monitoring for diabetes management - an application that requires both sensitivity and the kind of long-term reliability that has remained elusive in research demonstrations to date.

Cindy Chestek: Making Brain-Computer Interfaces More Durable

Chestek, a professor of biomedical engineering, works on the electrode interfaces between computers and neural tissue - the hardware that makes brain-computer interfaces possible. Current implantable neural recording electrodes face a well-documented reliability problem: the brain's immune response to implanted foreign material causes gradual degradation in signal quality over months to years, limiting the long-term utility of devices intended to restore communication or motor function in people with paralysis or neurodegenerative conditions.

Chestek's laboratory investigates electrode geometries, surface coatings, and materials that minimize the tissue response while maintaining stable electrical contact with neurons over the timescales - years to decades - that patients and clinicians actually need. This work intersects with her group's software contributions to decoding neural signals: extracting meaningful control commands from the noisy, variable signals that even high-quality electrodes record from living brain tissue.

Her research has contributed to human clinical trials of brain-computer interface systems and to the broader effort to move these technologies from laboratory demonstrations to reliable clinical tools available to the patients who need them.

The Award and Its Context

The Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature was created to address the persistent underrepresentation of women in technology leadership and to provide both visibility and concrete research support for women doing work that straddles scientific discovery and technological development. The $250,000 funding allocation is unrestricted in how it can be used within the recipients' research programs, which gives award winners flexibility to pursue directions that standard grant mechanisms might not support.

Both Gong and Chestek represent fields - organic electronics and neural engineering - where fundamental materials and interface science is being translated toward clinical and consumer applications within years rather than decades. The durability and biocompatibility problems their work addresses are genuine bottlenecks limiting the performance of medical technologies that already exist in prototype form but have not yet achieved the reliability needed for widespread clinical adoption.

From Materials to Patients

The path from polymer synthesis or electrode geometry to a device on or in a patient is long and involves regulatory, manufacturing, and clinical validation challenges that laboratory research does not address. Nevertheless, the materials and interfaces work that Gong and Chestek pursue is prerequisite to that translation. Without flexible semiconductors that survive sweat exposure and electrodes that maintain signal quality in living brain tissue, the more advanced clinical goals of continuous metabolic monitoring and long-term neural prosthetics remain out of reach.

Recognition of this foundational work through a substantial prize reflects a judgment, shared by the award's sponsors, that the technical barriers these researchers are addressing are among the central ones for next-generation biomedical technology.