Meenal Datta, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, has been named the inaugural Jane Schoelch DeFlorio Collegiate Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering.
“Professor Datta’s pioneering work brings to bear mechanical engineering’s tools and perspectives on the treatment and understanding of aggressive cancers,” said Patricia Culligan, the Matthew H. McCloskey Dean of the College of Engineering. “Already, her research, including innovative studies using microgravity in low earth orbit, is leading to promising new therapeutic approaches.”
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 devised 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. Datta’s work in this area was featured this October in Notre Dame’s signature “What would you fight for?” series.
Datta is the recipient of numerous awards. In October 2025, she received the Biomedical Engineering Society’s (BMES) 2025 Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award and a BMES Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) 2026 Rising Star Award. Previous awards include 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).
Datta joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2021, after receiving her Ph.D. from Tufts University in 2018 and completing a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Medical School-Massachusetts General Hospital.
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