Sangeeta N. Bhatia was born on June 24, 1968. She is an American inventor, teacher, and business owner who has training in both medicine and engineering. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she has many important positions and leads major research projects. She is known as the first woman doctor-scientist to be elected to all five of the United States' National Academies.

Current Appointments and Affiliations

At MIT, Bhatia holds the title of John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor in both the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). She is the Director of the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. She is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Additionally, she is an Institute Member at the Broad Institute and an Associate Faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

In addition to her research and academic work, Bhatia is the Founding Director of the MIT Faculty Founder Initiative. This program aims to help more MIT faculty members, especially women, start biotechnology companies. It seeks to address the issue of fewer women starting businesses in this field.

Bhatia has been a member of Brown University’s board of trustees since 2015. She became a fellow of the university in 2019 and currently serves as chair of academic affairs. She is also on the board of directors at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where she leads the science and technology committee. She has spoken about using engineering methods to solve medical problems at events such as the World Economic Forum, TED, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges, and the Cancer Moonshot.

Research and Impact

Bhatia uses tools from the computer industry that make things very small to help improve medicine. Her important work has helped make progress in treating cancer, liver disease, and infectious diseases. This has led to better ways to find diseases early, study how diseases work in the body, grow new tissues, move cells into the body, and create treatments for cancer.

Bhatia’s laboratory, called the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies (LMRT), works where living things and man-made systems meet. Scientists there design tiny technologies to solve difficult health problems.

Bhatia’s research during her doctoral studies helped keep liver cells alive outside the human body. She used methods from computer chip making and a process called photolithography to create tiny surfaces that support the growth of 2D and 3D human liver cells in a lab dish. This led to the invention of the “microliver,” a small model of a liver that changed how drugs are tested. It is now used worldwide by companies to check how well drugs work and predict harmful side effects. Later research in her lab, including using 3D printing to make fake blood vessels, aims to build larger tissue structures, with the goal of creating an artificial human liver. This work was among the first at MIT in the field of biological micro-electromechanical systems (Bio-MEMS).

The LMRT continues to use tiny technologies to help repair and regrow tissues, studying how liver cells interact with their surroundings. This improves treatments for liver disease, helps liver cells work better, and increases understanding of how the liver functions and fails. Her research has helped study diseases like hepatitis and malaria. In partnership with Christopher Chen at Boston University, Bhatia’s lab created microlivers that can be transplanted, have blood vessels, and survive inside the body, offering possible cures for both inherited and acquired liver diseases.

A major focus of LMRT’s work is creating tiny materials to study biology and treat cancer. This includes designing nanoparticles and materials with tiny holes that can find tumors, show changes in cells, improve imaging, or deliver medicine. Early work in 2002 with Erkki Ruoslahti involved making materials based on virus parts to target tumors in the body. More recently, Bhatia, along with Erkki Ruoslahti and Michael Sailor, has studied ways to engineer helpful bacteria that can detect or treat cancer cells.

For over ten years, LMRT has created new tools for diagnosing diseases. This includes designing tiny sensors with molecules from living things, such as peptide barcodes, that can show when diseases like cancer are present by reacting to enzymes that are active in diseased tissue. These special nanoparticles can detect diseases using simple tests on urine, breath, or blood samples, similar to an at-home pregnancy test. This method has been expanded to detect 12 diseases, including six types of cancer. Nanosensors can be used by breathing them in, injecting them into muscles, or taking them as probiotic bacteria. LMRT is also studying ways to diagnose diseases using breath for quick results and has developed tools using DNA barcodes and CRISPR technology, making cancer testing more affordable and available in low- and middle-income areas.

Early life and education

Sangeeta Bhatia was born in 1968 in Boston, Massachusetts, to parents who moved from India. She graduated from Lexington High School in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her father was an engineer and business owner, and her mother was one of the first women in India to earn an MBA. Bhatia became interested in engineering during her 10th-grade biology class and after visiting an MIT lab with her father, where she saw a demonstration of an ultrasound machine used to treat cancer.

She studied bioengineering at Brown University, where she joined a research group studying artificial organs. This experience helped her decide to continue her education in this field. After graduating with honors in 1990, Bhatia was first denied admission to the MD-PhD program at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) but was accepted into a master’s program in Mechanical Engineering. Later, she was admitted to the HST MD-PhD program, where she worked with advisor Mehmet Toner. She earned her Ph.D. in 1997 and her M.D. in 1999, followed by research training at Massachusetts General Hospital. Bhatia met her husband, Jagesh Shah, while they were both students in the HST program. Shah now works as an executive in the biotechnology industry. The couple has two daughters.

Career

Bhatia started her academic career in 1998 when she joined the bioengineering faculty at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). As an assistant professor, she received a five-year Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 1999. In 2001, she was honored with a "Teacher of the Year" award at the Jacobs School of Engineering. In 2003, she was named an "Innovator under 35" by MIT Technology Review.

In 2004, Bhatia co-authored the first undergraduate textbook on tissue engineering, Tissue Engineering, written for senior-level and first-year graduate courses with Bernhard Palsson. She also co-edited Microdevices in Biology and Medicine (2009) and Biosensing: International Research and Development (2005). In 2005, she joined the faculty at MIT in the Division of Health Sciences & Technology and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In 2006, The Scientist named her a "Scientist to Watch," and in 2008, she became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Since 2013, Bhatia has held additional roles at MIT and Harvard, including affiliations with the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology (2013), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (2014), the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering (2016), the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (2018), and the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship (2022).

Currently, Bhatia leads the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies and the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine at MIT. She is affiliated with Brigham and Women's Hospital and is part of the intramural faculty at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. She served on the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Board of Scientific Advisors and co-led the first synthetic biomarker think tank at the NCI (SYNDICATE) with Sanjiv Gambhir. She also co-chaired the first AACR conference on Precision Prevention, Early Detection, and Interception of Cancer and the annual Irwin M. Arias Symposium, a major event in liver research.

Entrepreneurship, Outreach, and Advocacy

Bhatia is an inventor who has created more than 65 patents related to medical and biotechnology uses of engineering over twenty years. Her work in starting companies includes:

• In 2008, she helped create Hepregen, a company based on her microliver technology for testing medicines. Hepregen was bought by BioIVT in 2018.
• In 2015, she started Glympse Bio, which uses her activity-based nanosensor technology to develop tools for diagnosing diseases and choosing treatments. Glympse Bio completed safety tests with people and merged with Sunbird Bio in 2023.
• She has also helped start other companies, including Satellite Bio (with Christopher Chen), Port Therapeutics (with Gabe Kwong and Mikhail Shapiro), Impilo Therapeutics (with Erkki Ruoslahti, Frank Slack, and Michael Sailor; acquired by Lisata Therapeutics in 2020), Ropirio Therapeutics (with Christopher Chen), Matrisome Bio (with Richard Hynes), and Amplifyer Bio (with J. Christopher Love, Viktor Adalsteinsson, and Todd Golub).

Bhatia supports fairness and inclusion in science and technology. She co-founded the MIT Faculty Founders Initiative with Susan Hockfield and Nancy Hopkins. This program helps increase the number of women who start companies in science and engineering. Studies showed that fewer than 10% of biotech startups started by MIT professors were founded by women, even though women make up 22% of MIT faculty. Her efforts to promote diversity include:

• Starting the Diversity Committee for the Biomedical Engineering Society.
• Co-founding KEYs, a program that invites middle-school girls to visit science labs to learn about technology.
• Leading the Diversity Committee at MIT’s Institute of Medical Engineering and Science.
• Serving on the Faculty Gender Equity Committee at MIT’s School of Engineering and advising the MIT Society of Women Engineers.

Bhatia’s work and advocacy have made her well-known in the media. She has been named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People (2014) and a top global thinker by Foreign Policy. Her story has been shared on TV Nova Science Now, in the film Picture a Scientist, and in books and podcasts. She has also appeared as a LEGO minifigure and been recognized by Vogue India’s Incredible Women. Over twenty years, Bhatia and her more than 85 trainees have written over 230 scientific papers and created more than 65 patents. By 2025, she has started 8 biotechnology companies that combine medicine with small-scale technology. About three-quarters of her former postdoctoral trainees are now university professors (half of whom are tenured), and a quarter of her 39 Ph.D. graduates are professors or hold leadership roles in biotech and pharmaceutical companies. About half of her graduate and postgraduate trainees in the past decade have identified as female. She has trained the next generation of scientists in nanomedicine and bioengineering worldwide. Notable people who studied under her include:

• Amit Agrawal, Chief Scientific Officer, Diagnostics Platform, Danaher
• Ava Amini, Principal Researcher, Microsoft
• Warren Chan, Dean of the College of Engineering and President’s Chair Professor in Engineering, Nanyang Technological University Singapore
• Arnav Chhabra, Co-founder, Satellite Bio
• Alice Chen, Chief Operating Officer, Curve Biosciences
• Amanda Chen, Vice President, Vertex Ventures HC
• Tal Danino, Associate Professor, Columbia University
• Jaideep Dudani, CEO, Ouro Medicines
• Gabe Kwong, Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Geoffrey von Maltzahn, General Partner at Flagship Pioneering
• Vyas Ramanan, Venture Partner, Third Rock Ventures
• Simone Schürle-Finke, Associate Professor, ETH Zurich
• Andrew Warren, Senior Director, Curie.Bio

Awards and honors

Dr. Bhatia is an inventor and supporter of diversity in science and engineering. She has been recognized with many honors, including being the first female physician-scientist in history to be elected to all five national academies in the United States:

• National Academy of Engineering (2015)
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015)
• National Academy of Inventors (2016)
• National Academy of Sciences (2017)
• National Academy of Medicine (2019)

She is also a Foreign Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. Other notable awards include:

• Lemelson-MIT Prize (2014) – known as the "Oscar for inventors," for creating important inventions and supporting future scientists.
• Heinz Award for Technology (2015) – for creating important inventions and supporting women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
• Othmer Gold Medal (2019) – from the Science History Institute.
• Several honorary doctorate degrees, including from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (2021), University of London Institute Cancer Research (2019), and Utrecht University in the Netherlands (2017).

Dr. Bhatia has also received the following honors:

• 2024 – David Perlman Memorial Award, American Chemical Society, Biochemical Technology
• 2024 – Founder Award, Kendall Square Association
• 2024 – Fellow, American Association for Cancer Research Academy
• 2023 – Fellow, Australian Academy of Technological Science & Engineering
• 2021 – Outstanding Scientist Award, AAISCR Cancer Research Annual Meeting
• 2019 – Honorary Degree, DSc (Medicine), University of London – Institute Cancer Research
• 2017 – Catalyst Award, Science Club for Girls
• 2017 – Innovation at the Intersection Award, Xconomy Awards, Biotech Week Boston
• 2017 – Honorary Degree, Doctorate, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
• 2017 – AIMBE STEM Award, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering
• 2015 – 20th Heinz Award for Technology, Heinz Family Foundation
• 2015 – Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2014 – Lemelson-MIT Prize, Lemelson-MIT Program
• 2014 – Pioneers of Miniaturization Prize, Lab on a Chip Lectureship at MicroTAS
• 2011 – Fellow, Massachusetts Academy of Sciences
• 2011 – Fellow, Biomedical Engineering Society
• 2011 – Brown Engineering Alumni Medal, Brown University School of Engineering
• 2011 – Thomas A. McMahon Mentoring Award, MIT, Health Sciences & Technology
• 2010 – John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor, MIT, HST & EECS, Endowed Chair
• 2010 – Young Investigator Award, American College of Clinical Pharmacology
• 2009 – Fellow, American Society for Clinical Investigation
• 2005 – Fellow, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering
• 2003 – Y.C. Fung Young Investigator Award, American Society of Mechanical Engineers
• 2002 – CAREER Award, National Science Foundation
• 2001 – Teacher of the Year, UCSD, Department of Bioengineering
• 1999 – Fellow, David and Lucile Packard Foundation

Books

• Bhatia, Sangeeta (1999). Microfabrication in Tissue Engineering and Bioartificial Organs. Microsystems, Volume 5. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4615-5235-2. ISBN: 978-1-4613-7386-5.
• Palsson, Bernhard; Bhatia, Sangeeta (2004). Tissue Engineering. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN: 0-13-041696-7. OCLC: 52960378.
• Nahmias, Yaakov; Bhatia, Sangeeta (2009). Microdevices in Biology and Medicine. Boston: Artech House. ISBN: 978-1-59693-405-4. OCLC: 542050628.
• Schultz, Jerome; Mrksich, Milan; Bhatia, Sangeeta N.; Brady, David J.; Ricco, Antionio J.; Walt, David R.; Wilkins, Charles L., eds. (July 15, 2006). Biosensing: International Research and Development. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN: 978-1-4020-4058-0.

Awards

Bhatia has received many awards and honors, including the following:

• 2023, Overseas Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (FTSE)
• 2019, Othmer Gold Medal, Science History Institute and others
• 2018, honorary Doctorate, Utrecht University
• 2017, Catalyst Award, Science Club for Girls
• 2015, Heinz Award, Heinz Family Foundation, in the Technology, the Economy and Employment category "for her important research in tissue engineering and disease detection, including growing functional liver cells outside the human body, and for her efforts to support women in STEM fields."
• 2014, Lemelson-MIT Prize, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "for her work to help future scientists and for creating inventions that improve health and patient care worldwide."
• 2011, BEAM (Brown Engineering Alumni Medal) Award, Brown University School of Engineering
• 2008, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator
• 1999, Packard Fellowship, David and Lucile Packard Foundation