Sangeeta N. Bhatia

Bhatia holds a number of patents for both clinical and biotechnological applications of engineering principles. In 2015, her company Glympse received initial funding from Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Theresia Gouw at Aspect Ventures. In 2018, Glympse received $22 million to further develop “activity sensors” to identify diseases and monitor patient response to drugs.

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. 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.

Since 2008, with assistance from the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation her lab has worked on the development of Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax cell-based assays. These are used to support the study of parasites and explore possible differential drug sensitivity and identify new anti-relapse medicines for malaria.

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

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. 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, and the National Academy of Inventors.

Bhatia's laboratory is also involved in a multidisciplinary effort to develop nanomaterials as tools for biological studies and as multifunctional agents for cancer therapies. Interests center around nanoparticles and nanoporous materials that can be designed to perform complex tasks. They may be able to home in on a tumor, signal changes in cells or tissues, enhance imaging, or release a therapeutic component. In 2002, Bhatia worked with Erkki Ruoslahti and Warren Chan to develop phage-derived peptide-targeted nanomaterials, or quantum dots, for in vivo targeting of tumors. By adding tumor-enzyme molecules to nanoparticles she has also created specialized nanoparticles that can react with diseased tissue to create synthetic biomarkers detectable in blood or urine samples. Another project involves engineering beneficial probiotics with the ability to detect or treat cancer cells.

Bhatia's dissertation became the basis for Microfabrication in tissue engineering and bioartificial organs (1999). 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. She was a co-editor of Microdevices in Biology and Medicine (2009) and Biosensing: International Research and Development (2005).

Bhatia joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1998. 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, and was named an Innovator under 35 by MIT Technology Review in 2003.

Bhatia studied bioengineering at Brown University where she joined a research group studying artificial organs which convinced her to pursue graduate study the field. After graduating with honors in 1990, Bhatia was initially rejected from the M.D.-Ph.D. 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 M.D.-Ph.D. program where she was advised by Mehmet Toner and Martin Yarmush. She received a Ph.D. in 1997 and an M.D. in 1999, and completed postdoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Sangeeta N. Bhatia, M.D., Ph.D. (b. 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.