Innovators Under 352016
The people in our 16th annual celebration of young innovators are disrupters and dreamers. They’re inquisitive and persistent, inspired and inspiring. No matter whether they’re pursuing medical breakthroughs, refashioning energy technologies, making computers more useful, or engineering cooler electronic devices—and regardless of whether they are heading startups, working in big companies, or doing research in academic labs—they all are poised to be leaders in their fields.
Inventors
Muyinatu Bell
Creating clearer imaging to spot cancer earlier and more accurately.
Dinesh Bharadia
A seemingly impossible radio design will double wireless data capabilities.
Adam Bry
Building drones that can navigate the world and serve as airborne assistants.
Wei Gao
The engineer has built sweatbands that monitor your health.
Jiawei Gu
The AI expert designs interfaces that let technology assist rather than annoy.
Alex Hegyi
A new type of camera could let smartphones find counterfeit drugs or spot the ripest peach.
Kendra Kuhl
She developed a simple reactor to turn carbon dioxide into useful chemicals.
Desmond Loke
Throw away your RAM and flash drive. Here’s a better type of memory.
Evan Macosko
A breakthrough in probing how cells create complex tissues and organs.
Entrepreneurs
Heather Bowerman
Cheap hormone tests could begin to address gender disparities in health care.
Kelly Gardner
This bioengineer figured out how to handle a key challenge facing biotech startups.
Meron Gribetz
An augmented-reality dreamer tries to turn his vision into a business.
Christine Ho
Her startup is commercializing thin, flexible, printable batteries that she developed at UC Berkeley.
Samay Kohli
After greasing the wheels of India’s e-commerce boom, this executive eyes overseas expansion.
Stephanie Lampkin
She sees a way to make Silicon Valley’s workforce look more like the rest of society.
Ari Roisman
Why the future of communication could be on your wrist.
Visionaries
Nora Ayanian
To build better machines, a roboticist goes far outside her field for guidance.
Jonathan Downey
The creator of control software for drones has foreseen the advantages of autonomous aircraft for years.
Kevin Esvelt
A scientist who is developing new gene-editing techniques also warns of their potential.
Maithilee Kunda
People on the autism spectrum are inspiring her novel approach to creating artificial intelligence.
Evan Spiegel
The cofounder of Snapchat figured out that people wanted something different from social media.
Jean Yang
Why don’t computers keep our personal data secure by default?
Humanitarians
Jagdish Chaturvedi
This doctor can laugh about the complex path he took to becoming an innovator.
Ehsan Hoque
If you want to be the life of the party, practice by talking to a machine first.
Kelly Sanders
A researcher in drought-ridden California tries to better account for the ways we use water.
Ronaldo Tenório
A mobile app gives deaf people a sign-language interpreter they can take anywhere.
Sonia Vallabh
A devastating personal diagnosis led her to become a scientist on the trail of a cure.
Pioneers
Qing Cao
His inventions are helping IBM in its decade-plus quest to replace silicon transistors with more efficient carbon nanotubes.
Ying Diao
She knows how to print perfect plastic solar cells.
Vivian Ferry
She uses nanocrystals to trap light and increase the efficiency of solar cells.
Sergey Levine
He teaches robots to watch and learn from their own successes.
Oriol Vinyals
Showing computers how to learn might seem like a game, but it’s also serious business.
Aleksandra Vojvodic
A computation whiz speeds up the search for catalysts that will make green chemistry possible.
Yihui Zhang
Pop-up nanostructures make it far easier to fabricate very tiny shapes.
Jia Zhu
What to do if there is no clean water around.