Surita Bhatia is an American chemist who is professor and vice provost of faculty affairs at

Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system's ...

. Her work considers the structure of soft materials, including polymeric hydrogels and colloidal glasses. She was elected Fellow of the

American Institute of Chemical Engineers The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) is a professional organization for chemical engineers. AIChE was actually established in 1908 to distinguish chemical engineers as a profession independent of chemists and mechanical engineer ...

, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the

Society of Rheology The Society of Rheology is an American professional society formed in December, 1929 to represent scientists and technologists working in the field of rheology, the science of the deformation and flow of matter. Current membership is of the order ...

in 2020.

Early life and education

Bhatia was an undergraduate studied at the University of Delaware. She majored in chemical engineering, and graduated in 1995. She moved to Princeton University for her graduate studies, where she worked with William B. Russel on the rheology of associative polymers. Bhatia completed her doctoral studies in 2000, and moved to the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) Complex Fluids Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher.

Research and career

Bhatia joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2001, where she was awarded an National Science Foundation CAREER Award to study soft attractive gels. At UMass, Bhatia developed engineering education programme that taught about equity, diversity and the societal impacts of engineering. Her teaching materials were selected by the National Academy of Engineering as an example of best practise in education. She has led programs to support underrepresented students in the biomedical sciences. In 2012, Bhatia joined the department of chemistry at

, where she was promoted to professor in 2015. She holds a joint role as a staff scientist at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Bhatia has worked to elucidate structure-properties relationships of complex fluids using ultra small-angle X-ray scattering and ultra small-angle neutron scattering. She combines these techniques with rheology to establish the molecular mechanisms that underpin dynamically arrested states and re-entrant behavior in colloidal systems.

Awards and honors

* 2012

AIChE The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) is a professional organization for chemical engineers. AIChE was actually established in 1908 to distinguish chemical engineers as a profession independent of chemists and mechanical engineers ...

Women in Chemical Engineering Mentorship Excellence Award * 2018 AIChE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Chemical Engineering * 2020 Elected Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers * 2020 Elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering * 2020 Elected Fellow of

Selected publications

* * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bhatia, Surita Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American chemists University of Delaware alumni Princeton University alumni University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty Stony Brook University faculty American women academics 21st-century American women American academics of Indian descent