The princess who runs Wakanda's laboratories, invents most of what makes the country what it is, and is still a teenager when we meet her.
Shuri is the best argument the Wakanda films make. The country’s advantage is not the vibranium, which anyone can dig up, but the fact that it has been allowed to do a century of uninterrupted science with it, and Shuri is what that looks like in a person.
She is also written as a younger sibling rather than as a prodigy, which is rarer and much better. She takes the work seriously and her brother not at all, and the film gets most of its warmth from the gap between those two things.
The Avengers come to her because there is nobody else. The most advanced technology on Earth belongs to a teenager in a country that officially does not have any.
Show detailsA specific inspiration
Reference material notes that the character, as well as being adapted from the comics, is modelled on Q from the James Bond films: the person in the basement who hands the hero their equipment and is visibly cleverer than they are.
That reading holds through her first two films and then stops holding, because Q never has to take the job upstairs.