Meenal Datta

Dr. Meenal Datta is a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. She received her Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Tufts University in 2018. Dr. Datta specializes in mechanism-based preclinical research at the interface of engineering and biomedicine that has the potential to be rapidly translated to the clinic. Leveraging her multidisciplinary training, she researches abnormal tissue microenvironments present in a variety of diseases ranging from virulent tuberculosis to benign schwannoma to deadly glioblastoma that, surprisingly, share unifying features. In her Ph.D., Dr. Datta discovered that pulmonary tuberculosis granulomas harbor an aberrant vasculature that can be re-engineered to improve drug delivery. In her postdoctoral training, Dr. Datta is reprogramming the glioblastoma microenvironment to improve response to immunotherapy. Dr. Datta has received numerous awards including AACR-Loxo Oncology Postdoctoral (single-recipient award) and NIH F31 Predoctoral fellowships. She recently received a fundable score on an NIH K22 career transition award.