Meenal Datta, the Jane Schoelch DeFlorio Collegiate Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award to advance her research on uncovering how mechanical forces disrupt the immune system.
The prestigious CAREER award supports young faculty who have demonstrated their potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, and to advance the mission of their institution.
Datta’s CAREER project, Mechanisms of Tumor Growth-Induced Immunomechanical Dysfunction, is part of a burgeoning area of research called immunomechanics—a field that lies at the interface of mechanobiology and immunology.
Through the project, she will continue her investigations of how the physical forces of growing tumors interfere with the ability of immune cells to find and destroy cancer cells. The outcomes have broad implications for improving our understanding of cancer and immunity, which will ultimately guide the design of new therapies.
In addition to research in the laboratory, as part of the CAREER grant, Datta will work to cultivate the next generation of immunomechanics researchers by establishing research programs at Notre Dame for high school students and undergraduates from other higher education institutions, with both groups of young students to be mentored by graduate and postdoctoral researchers.
While Datta will continue her research on immunomechanics through this new NSF CAREER award, she will simultaneously pursue a second research focus: health science in space. Her lab has been using microgravity to model and treat cancer, with their work in this area featured this past October in Notre Dame’s signature “What would you fight for?” series. The latest investigation within this research prong is a new NSF-funded experiment on SpaceX-34, which launched on May 15. The payload contained glioblastoma patient-derived cancer-immune organoids that returned to earth after 30 days of growth in space and are now being analyzed by her lab.
In addition to the NSF CAREER award, Datta has received the Biomedical Engineering Society’s (BMES) 2025 Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Award, a BMES Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) 2026 Rising Star Award, the Young Investigator Program Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 2025, a BMES Young Innovator Award in Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering in 2024, a National Institutes of Health award for early-stage investigators in 2023, and a National Institutes of Health career transition award in 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