Saturday, July 21, 2012

Pentagon’s Most Important Research Agency DARPA Gets A New Boss : Arati Prabhakar

Pentagon’s most important research agency has a new boss – Indian American Arati Prabhakar. 

Until last year, Prabhakar was a partner in the IT and energy practice at USVP. USVP's portfolio includes battery maker Contour Energy Systems, combinatorial R&D player Intermolecular, and at least in the past, solar and political black hole Solyndra. According to the same article, quoting a "senior defense official," “Dr. Prabhakar, who underwent extensive vetting, had no involvement in the federal loan guarantee for Solyndra and wasn’t involved in the restructuring of the loan.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) allocates its $3 billion budget to foster new technologies that will "maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military and prevent technological surprise from harming our national security by sponsoring revolutionary, high-payoff research bridging the gap between fundamental discoveries and their military use," according to the DARPA website.

Prabhakar has an impressive background. She holds an MS and a PhD in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology, served at DARPA from 1986 to 1993, and was head of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 1993 to 1997. She spent a decade as a VC at USVP. Prabhakar looks to have been the only woman partner and only Indian-American at the firm, which includes Partner Irwin Federman.

Dr. Prabhakar is also a member of the SRI International's Board of Directors, National Academies' Science Technology and Economic Policy (STEP) Board, and the College of Engineering Advisory Board at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, she chairs the Efficiency and Renewables Advisory Committee (ERAC) for the U.S. Department of Energy.

For the past ten years, Dr. Prabhakar was a partner at U.S. Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, where she worked with cleantech and IT entrepreneurs to build new companies. Previously, Dr. Prabhakar was president at Interval Research Corporation, a laboratory for consumer technology. Prior to Interval, she was chief technology officer at Raychem, a publicly held specialty materials company.

In 1993, President Clinton appointed Dr. Prabhakar as the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where she led the 3,000-person organization in its work with companies across multiple industries. In 1984, she was invited to Washington, DC, on a U.S. Congressional fellowship with the Office of Technology Assessment. After her fellowship, she served several years at DARPA —first as a program manager and then as founding director of the Microelectronics Technology Office.

 

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