Innovator: Carnegie Mellon's Richard McCullough

The screens that dominate our lives—smartphones, tablets, televisions—keep getting sleeker and sleeker. Richard D. McCullough, dean of the College of Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, says that, soon enough, they'll be as thin as a coat of paint.

At Plextronics, where he is co-founder and chief scientist, McCullough is working to perfect conductive "ink." The ink is actually a polymer, or a synthesized chain of molecules, that can conduct electricity like metal while remaining flexible like rubber. It's a "disruptive technology that can be printed on anything," he says. A surface as thin as a magazine page, for instance, could become a bendable, foldable video player. "Imagine a Kindle (AMZN) or an iPad (AAPL) on steroids," says McCullough, 52, who earned his PhD in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University.