Sangeeta Bhatia

Sangeeta N. Bhatia (born 1968) is an American biological engineer and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.

Bhatia's research investigates applications of micro- and nano-technology for tissue repair and regeneration.

She applies ideas from computer technology and engineering to the design of miniaturized biomedical tools for the study and treatment of diseases, in particular liver disease, hepatitis, malaria and cancer.

After graduating with honors in 1990,

Bhatia was initially rejected from the MD-PhD program run by the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) but was accepted into the Mechanical Engineering masters program.

She was later accepted to the HST MD-PhD program where she was advised by Mehmet Toner and Martin Yarmush.

She received a PhD in 1997 and an MD in 1999, and completed postdoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Bhatia joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1998.

Bhatia's dissertation became the basis for Microfabrication in tissue engineering and bioartificial organs (1999).

As an assistant professor, Bhatia was awarded a five-year Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 1999.

She was named a 2001 "Teacher of the Year" in the Bioengineering Department at the Jacobs School of Engineering,

In 2003, she was named by the MIT Technology Review as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

and was named an Innovator under 35 by MIT Technology Review in 2003.

Bhatia co-authored the first undergraduate textbook on tissue engineering, Tissue engineering (2004), written for senior-level and first-year graduate courses with Bernhard Palsson.

and Biosensing: International Research and Development (2005).

Bhatia's parents emigrated from India to Boston, Massachusetts; her father was an engineer and her mother was one of the first women to receive an MBA in India.

In 2005, she left UCSD and joined the MIT faculty in the Division of Health Sciences & Technology and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

She was also named a "Scientist to Watch" by The Scientist in 2006.

She has received multiple awards and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Inventors.

Bhatia was named a "Scientist to Watch" by The Scientist in 2006 and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2008.

Bhatia currently directs the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies at MIT and is affiliated with Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Bhatia is a strong advocate for gender equity and inclusivity in STEM fields.

Bhatia helped to found the Diversity Committee of the Biomedical Engineering Society, and is involved with MIT's Society of Women Engineers.

While at MIT, she helped to start Keys to Empowering Youth, a program that brings middle-school girls to visit hi-tech labs as a way to encourage them in science and technology.

Bhatia and her husband, Jagesh Shah have two daughters.

She was a co-editor of Microdevices in Biology and Medicine (2009)

Bhatia was motivated to become an engineer after her 10th grade biology class and a trip with her father into an MIT lab to see a demonstration of an ultrasound machine for cancer treatment.

Bhatia studied bioengineering at Brown University where she joined a research group studying artificial organs which convinced her to pursue graduate study the field.

In 2015, Bhatia was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for tissue engineering and tissue regeneration technologies, stem cell differentiation, and preclinical drug evaluation.

Bhatia's doctoral work focused on the development of a way to keep liver cells functioning outside of the human body.

She adapted ideas from computer chip design and engineering to the microfabrication of a substrate for liver cells.

She successfully applied techniques from photolithography to petri dishes, to create a substrate that would support growth of a functioning microliver in a dish.

Bhatia also used co-cultures of more than one cell type to prevent dedifferentiation of the liver cells, building on the work of Christiane Guguen-Guillouzo in France.

She and her coworkers have also used techniques from 3D printing to create a lattice of sugar as a framework for a synthetic vascular system with the goal of supporting larger tissue structures such as an artificial liver.

Her work was one of the first projects at MIT in the area of biological micro-electromechanical systems, or Bio-MEMS.

She is interested in using arrays of living cells as high-throughput platforms to study fundamental aspects of Bio-MEMS in stem cells.

Bhatia's research in the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies (LMRT) continues to apply micro- and nanotechnology ideas to tissue repair and regeneration.

She studies the interactions between hepatocytes (liver cells) and their microenvironment and develops microfabrication tools to improve cellular therapies for liver disease in an approach referred to as hepatic tissue engineering.

The goal is to maximize hepatocyte function,

facilitate design of effective cellular therapies for liver disease, and improve fundamental understanding of liver physiology and pathophysiology.