Meenal Datta, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, has been selected by the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) to receive its 2025 Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award. This single-recipient award is BMES’s most prestigious honor for early stage investigators. Prior winners have gone on to become global leaders in biomedical engineering.
BMES is the leading society for biomedical engineers and bioengineers. Its nearly 7000 members include innovators across academia, industry, and healthcare.
Datta’s lab focuses on deciphering the atypical tumor microenvironment that drives disease progression and treatment resistance in incurable cancers such as glioblastoma. To this end, Datta’s lab has pioneered work at the intersection of mechanical engineering and immunology (“immunomechanics” and “mechano-immunology”) to understand and overcome cancer’s resistance to immune detection and immunotherapy.
By understanding and overcoming the biological, chemical, electrical, and mechanical abnormalities found in solid tumors, her team develops new knowledge and therapeutic approaches. Most recently, they have pioneered a technique for measuring a brain tumor’s mechanical force that provides a new model to estimate how much brain tissue a patient has lost—a technique that, ideally, surgeons can easily adopt into their daily workflow.
One key direction of the Datta lab is health science in space, using microgravity to model and treat cancer. At the BMES conference in San Diego on October 11, where she will receive her award, Datta will present “Mechano-immunology: On Earth and in Space.” She will share findings on how macrophages—immune cells in tissues and tumors—apply mechanical forces, respond to compression, and behave differently in cancer-immune organoids grown on the International Space Station versus those grown on earth.
Datta has previously received the Young Investigator Program award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (2025), the BMES Young Innovator Award in Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (2024), a National Institutes of Health award for early-stage investigators (2023), and a National Institutes of Health career transition award (2021). She is also leading a team of engineers and scientists to leverage microgravity and mechanics for immune cell-based therapies, funded by the Bioengineering and Life Sciences (BELS) Initiative.
She serves as a concurrent faculty member in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and is a faculty adviser for Notre Dame’s graduate programs in bioengineering and materials science and engineering.
Datta is affiliated with Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health, the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health, Harper Cancer Research Institute, NDnano, the Warren Center for Drug Discovery, the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society, and the Boler-Parseghian Center for Rare Diseases.
—Mary Hendriksen, Notre Dame Engineering