Many scientists would feel like slackers when faced with Y. Shrike Zhang's publication record. Only 32 years old, he already has more than 120 publications to his credit. And around 50 of those were published in 2016 and 2017 alone.

As a postdoctoral researcher in Ali Khademhosseini's lab at Harvard Medical School, Zhang led a subgroup of about 30 scientists—nearly a third of the overall lab. "He's the total package," says Khademhosseini, now at the University of California, Los Angeles. "He's not just good at science and writing papers, but he's also incredible at funding and handling larger operations. He's got that level of maturity fairly early."

Now with his own lab at Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Zhang develops model human tissues and organ mimics called organoids to predict people's responses to drugs and help personalize medicine. He focuses on improving every aspect of such systems, including the biofabrication techniques that grow the tissues, the microfluidics that supply them with nutrients, and the analytical methods needed to monitor their health.

Instead of just culturing cells, Zhang is working on direct printing of tissues with so-called bioinks—mixtures of cells and biomaterials that can be used in three-dimensional printers. The 3-D bioprinting lets him control where cells are deposited to build an organoid. "It's more robust and flexible, and it potentially gives you higher reproducibility," he says.

Zhang is meanwhile trying to bridge what he sees as a missing link in the organs-on-chips field: measurement technology. "People don't have many ways to look at how organoids are behaving or responding to drug molecules," he says. "We're developing a miniaturized microscope that can allow us to do 3-D imaging of organoids in a bioreactor. We can directly fit a small imager at the bottom of a bioreactor and look at how the organoids behave in three dimensions."

Khademhosseini expects Zhang to go far. "I'm confident he's going to do a lot of incredible things in the next 10 years," he says. "Many people just have a fairly constant, slightly upward-sloping trajectory. Shrike's trajectory is astronomical."