Hikari Okita's journey into science began with something as ordinary as needing glasses in elementary school—a small inconvenience that sparked a lifelong curiosity about the workings of life itself. Now, at the Institute of Science Tokyo, the young researcher is pursuing one of humanity's most profound questions: the origin of life. After earning her Ph.D. in biomolecular engineering from Nagoya University, Okita joined this year's Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia: Healthcare & Science list as one of 18 emerging scientists reshaping the boundaries of what's possible in healthcare and scientific discovery across the continent.
Okita's breakthrough work centers on xeno-nucleic acid, or XNA—a synthetic molecule that functions like DNA and RNA but with crucial advantages. XNA is far more durable than natural genetic material, resistant to the body's enzymes, which could revolutionize drug discovery, delivery, and medical diagnostics. Her research suggests this technology might help scientists trace life's origins back billions of years and even create artificial life forms. "Finding the origins of life, something I couldn't do if I researched cures for diseases at a pharmaceutical company, I thought would make my life more colorful," she reflects. Her dedication has already earned recognition: in 2024, Okita won the Nagoya University 3 Minute Thesis Competition and claimed the 20th L'Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Japan Fellowship in Life Sciences.
The 18 scientists and researchers on this year's list are charting new territories across multiple disciplines. Liu Zhengwu, a 29-year-old assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong, is developing brain-computer interface technologies that could allow people to control external devices through thought alone. His research into decoding and monitoring brain signals has garnered significant scientific attention, with publications in Nature Communications, Nature Electronics, and Science Advances totaling more than 1,700 citations. From Vietnam, Hieu Nguyen, a Knight-Hennessy scholar at Stanford University's School of Medicine, recently contributed to a groundbreaking paper in Science exploring how certain gene mutations cause cancer. Beyond his research, Nguyen serves as an advisor to the World Telehealth Initiative, a California-based nonprofit bringing long-distance medical services to underserved communities worldwide.
As artificial intelligence increasingly shapes daily life, several listees are focusing their efforts on making this technology more responsible and inclusive. Zhang Wenxuan, an assistant professor at Singapore University of Technology and Design, is developing SeaLLMs—a series of large language models tailored for Southeast Asian languages including Indonesian, Thai, and Vietnamese. His work earned him a place on Stanford University's World's Top 2% scientists list in 2024. Sean Du, an assistant professor of computing and data science at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, is studying responsible AI deployment and methods to reduce model hallucination. Meanwhile, Shi Weijia, an incoming assistant professor at Cornell University, led the FlexOlmo project at Seattle's Allen Institute for AI, which pioneered new ways to protect data ownership during model training by letting data owners determine when their information is active in a system. In 2024, she received an outstanding paper award from the Association for Computational Linguistics.
These researchers represent a generation determined to solve humanity's deepest puzzles—from the origins of life itself to the responsible development of transformative technologies—while ensuring their discoveries benefit society broadly.