Tidbit from 2014: award for inventors
The Lemelson-MIT prize, worth $500,000, has been America’s most generous award for inventors since 1994, and this year it went to an Indian-American for the first time. Sangeeta Bhatia, a professor of biomedical engineering at MIT, has been recognized for her work in developing miniaturized technologies that have commercial applications in health care. Examples include a paper urine test for detecting cancer and artificially produced microlivers that play a role in combating infectious diseases. Also an entrepreneur, Bhatia, who has an M.D. and a Ph.D., will donate a portion of the prize money to the MIT Society of Women Engineers. While Bhatia laments the shortage of women in science and engineering fields, and thinks there aren’t enough opportunities and encouragement for women, she counts herself lucky. “The people in my life who have seen more for me than I saw for myself, who believed in me and promoted me, were mostly men, including my graduate advisor, my first investor, and my husband,” Bhatia notes in an essay titled ‘Closing the Hi-Tech Gender Gap.’
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