Sangeeta Bhatia, M.D., Ph.D.

Sangeeta Bhatia is an institute member of the Broad Institute. At MIT, she is the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. She is also the director of the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies. In addition, she is the director of the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine and a member of the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology — both part of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. She is an affiliate faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Trained as both a physician and engineer, Bhatia leads a laboratory dedicated to leveraging miniaturization tools from the world of semiconductor manufacturing to impact human health. She has pioneered technologies for interfacing living cells with synthetic systems, enabling new applications in tissue regeneration, stem cell differentiation, medical diagnostics, and drug delivery. Her multidisciplinary team has developed a broad range of inventions, including human micro livers that model human drug metabolism, liver disease, and interaction with pathogens. Her group also develops nanoparticles and nanoporous materials that can be designed to study, diagnose, and treat a variety of diseases, including cancer.

Bhatia co-authored the first undergraduate textbook on tissue engineering and is a frequent advisor to governmental organizations on nanobiotechnology, biomedical microsystems, and tissue engineering. She has contributed to more than 40 issued or pending patents and launched multiple biotechnology companies with more than 70 commercial products at the intersection of medicine and miniaturization. Prior to her positions at MIT, she held a tenured position at the University of California, San Diego. She has worked at Pfizer, Genetics Institute, ICI Pharmaceuticals, and Organogenesis. 

She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors. She is a fellow of the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences, Biomedical Engineering Society, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and American Society for Clinical Investigation. She has received the 2014 Lemelson-MIT Prize; the Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy, and Employment; the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering; the National Science Foundation CAREER Award; the Y.C. Fung Young Investigator Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; the Tanabe Young Investigator Award of the American College of Clinical Pharmacology; the Brown Engineering Alumni Medal; and the Merkin Fellowship of the Broad Institute. In addition, Bhatia has been the recipient of the Harvard Medical School Diversity Award and the Harvard-MIT Thomas A. McMahon Mentoring Award, as well as an honorary doctorate degree from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She also serves on Brown University’s Board of Trustees.

Bhatia earned her B.S. in biomedical engineering from Brown University. She earned her M.S. in mechanical engineering and her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from MIT and her M.D. from Harvard Medical School.

October 2019