Surita R. Bhatia

Surita R. Bhatia

Stony Brook University

Chemical Engineer
Fellow, Elected 2020

Prof. Surita Bhatia has worked in the area of rheology, structure, and assembly of polymeric gels, soft biomaterials, and nanoparticle dispersions for over 20 years. Her research program combines characterization techniques to probe structure and dynamics over a wide range of length and time scales, such as ultra-small-angle X-ray and neutron scattering (USAXS/USANS) and X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS); with rheological and transport measurements. Prof. Bhatia is a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). She has received an NSF CAREER Award, a Dupont Young Professor Award, a 3M Corporation Non-Tenured Faculty Award, and a 2018 AIChE Women’s Initiatives Committee (WIC) Award for Outstanding Contributions to Chemical Engineering. Exclusive of center grants, she has been PI or Co-PI on grants totaling $16 million from NSF, NIH, the Department of Energy, philanthropic foundations, and private industry; including a recently awarded $3M NSF NRT training grant on Quantitative Analysis of Dynamic Structures.

Prof. Bhatia also has strong interests in mentoring, engineering education, and diversity in STEM fields. In this regard, she has served as PI on three NSF REU projects, joint-PI on NIH IMSD and NIH PREP programs for underrepresented minority students in the biomedical sciences. She is a recipient of the national AIChE WIC Mentorship Excellence Award and was an invited participant at the 2009 National Academy of Engineering “Frontiers of Engineering Education” Symposium and at the 2011 NSF/American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Workshop on Gender Diversity in Nanoscience Fields.

Prof. Bhatia received her bachelor's degree from the University of Delaware and her Ph.D. from Princeton University, both in Chemical Engineering, followed by postdoctoral training at the Rhodia/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Complex Fluids Laboratory. She began her career in public higher education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was a Professor of Chemical Engineering, Adjunct Professor of Polymer Science and Engineering, Associate Director of the Institute for Cellular Engineering, and on the Executive Committee and co-lead of the Bionanotechnology Thrust of the NSF-funded Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing. In 2012, she moved to a joint position as a Staff Scientist with the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a faculty member in the Chemistry Department at Stony Brook University. At Stony Brook, Dr. Bhatia served as Vice Chair for Research and Facilities in the Department of Chemistry and is currently Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, Professor of Chemistry, and Affiliate Professor of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering.

Based on the documents submitted by Norman J. Wagner.