On Fridays, the usually tranquil space of HHMI investigator Sangeeta Bhatia’s office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) gets a little crowded. The room fills with energy as her team gathers in two groups—liver researchers first, then the cancer team—and clusters, about 10 at a time, around a table better suited for 6. Her students and postdoctoral fellows have her full attention as they share new data and devise future experiments, jumping up occasionally to sketch out an idea on the room’s white board. “I love Fridays,” Bhatia says. “They’re nothing but science.”

Bhatia’s lab group works at the intersection of technology and medicine. Her research program has two main goals: engineering a lab-grown liver that can one day be implanted into patients, and using nanomaterials to design better ways to detect tumors and deliver therapeutics to cancer cells. Her group is attacking these problems—plus a few others—from several angles, integrating the tools of tissue engineering, materials science, and microfabrication.

Photo: Jason Grow