Bhatia was motivated to become an engineer after her 10th grade biology class, and a trip with her father into an MIT lab to see a demonstration of an ultrasound machine for cancer treatment.

[4][18][19] Bhatia currently directs the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies at MIT and is affiliated with Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

[1] While at MIT, she helped to start Keys to Empowering Youth, a program that brings middle-school girls to visit hi-tech labs as a way to encourage them in science and technology.

[24] She and her coworkers have also used techniques from 3D printing to create a lattice of sugar as a framework for a synthetic vascular system with the goal of supporting larger tissue structures such as an artificial liver.

[27][28] Bhatia's research in the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies (LMRT) continues to apply micro- and nanotechnology ideas to tissue repair and regeneration.

These are used to support the study of parasites and explore possible differential drug sensitivity and identify new anti-relapse medicines for malaria.

[36][37] Bhatia's laboratory is also involved in a multidisciplinary effort to develop nanomaterials as tools for biological studies and as multifunctional agents for cancer therapies.

[38] In 2002, Bhatia worked with Erkki Ruoslahti and Warren Chan to develop phage-derived peptide-targeted nanomaterials, or quantum dots, for in vivo targeting of tumors.

[38] In 2015, her company Glympse Bio received initial funding from Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Theresia Gouw at Aspect Ventures.

In 2018, Glympse received $22 million to further develop “activity sensors” to identify diseases and monitor patient response to drugs.