Dr. Yuki Tanaka

Background

Yuki studied bioluminescence in deep-sea organisms, fascinated by how they produced light without heat in crushing cold and darkness. Her Schmidt year at Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science led to a materials breakthrough: a self-illuminating hydrogel that uses the same enzymatic mechanism as her deep-sea organisms, with no power source required.

The leap story

“The ocean invents things millions of years before we do. I just stopped treating it as a subject and started treating it as an engineering textbook.”