Sangeeta Bhatia, director of the Laboratory Multiscale Regenerative Technologies and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of six recipients of this year’s Heinz Awards.

The program recognizes innovative work in the arts, environment, human condition, public policy and economics categories.

The Indian American researcher was honored in the “Technology, the Economy and Employment” category for her “seminal work in tissue engineering and disease detection, including the cultivation of functional liver cells outside of the human body, and for her passion in promoting the advancement of women in the STEM fields,” the Pittsburgh, Pa.-based Heinz Family Foundation said April 23.

As a graduate student at MIT, Bhatia was given the task to cultivate living liver cells in a petri dish, a challenge that has proved unsuccessful for many years. After three years, a visit to a microfabrication facility — where students laid circuits out on silicon chips — inspired her to experiment with the process to see if it could be used to “print” tiny liver cells on plastic.

The result was the first human “microliver,” a miniature model organ — about the width of a human hair — that makes it possible to test drug reactions efficiently and predictively, and could eventually lead to an artificial human liver.

Microlivers are now used by dozens of biopharmaceutical firms and are being developed as a powerful laboratory tool to test cures for malaria, specifically the testing of drugs that can eradicate the reservoir of parasites that remain in the liver even after a patient’s symptoms subside.

The Heinz award, Bhatia told the Associated Press, helps “bring science into the public eye so that everyone can appreciate the dedication and innovation that is happening in laboratories all over the country.”

Each of the five awards includes $250,000. Winners will be recognized at a ceremony in Pittsburgh May 13.

Established by Teresa Heinz in 1993 to honor her late husband, U.S. Senator John Heinz, the awards honor the accomplishments and spirit of the senator by recognizing the achievements of individuals in the areas of greatest importance to him.

Bhatia's MIT laboratory has also developed simple, affordable cancer screening tools. One tool uses tiny particles or nanoparticles to create biomarkers for cancer in urine samples on paper strips; another is a “cancer-detecting yogurt," containing engineered probiotic bacteria.

Since her undergraduate days, Bhatia has been known as an advocate for gender diversity in the sciences, including co-founding a program which works on college campuses to attract young girls to engineering.

A Lemelson-MIT Prize winner in 2014, she told an MIT journal last year women are grossly underrepresented in technology. “…Here are some numbers that I found truly astonishing. Women lead only three percent of tech startups, account for only four percent of the senior venture partners funding such startups and represent only five percent of the founders, advisors and directors at MIT technology spinoffs.”

“Are you as shocked as I was? What if I tell you that more than 50 percent of students in some MIT undergraduate science majors are women — and that’s been the case for almost 20 years? Where do these talented women go, and what are the implications of that drain?”

“If we believe that entrepreneurship is a fundamental engine of progress, that it is a path to getting ideas into the world, then what does it mean for our society if the ideas that germinate in the minds of all those young women rarely turn into companies with products?” she asked.

“(By the way, women-led private tech companies have 12 percent higher revenue and 35 percent higher return on investment than those led by men, according to the Kauffman Foundation. This shouldn’t have to be true to make us care, but it actually is.)”

“My biggest fan and mentor has always been my dad, himself a serial entrepreneur. When I became a professor, he had mixed feelings about me climbing the ivory tower. To encourage me, he asked one simple question: ‘When will you start your first company?’ (As it turned out, I started my first company within five years. Since then, my students and I have founded 10 companies between us.),” Bhatia said.

“Along the same lines, I appreciate having had a working mom who was a trailblazer, having been one of the first women in India to receive an MBA. However, it’s worth noting that 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. The truth is that changing the face of technology requires the involvement of men who care about it.”