Arati Prabhakar is an American engineer, who was the Director of DARPA, United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where she served from 2012-2017. She was born in India, on February 2, 1959, but later on, her family moved to the US when she was three years old.

Arati graduated in Bachelor of Science of electrical engineering from Texas Tech University and earned Master of Science in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. Having received her Doctorate in applied physics, she began her career as a Congressional Fellow at the Office of Technology Assessment.

Dr. Arati has worked towards creating new technologies and businesses through investing in world class engineers and scientists. The insertion of new semiconductor technologies into military systems was mainly demonstrated by her.

She helped in rethinking complex military systems in innovative ways and addressed national security challenges while improving the technological advances in fields such as mathematics, synthetic biology, and neurotechnology.

Appointed as the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology by President William Clinton in 1993, she led the organization in its work with companies across multiple industries.

After moving to Silicon Valley in 1997, Dr. Arati Prabhakar served as the Chief Technology officer and Senior Vice President at Raychem, and later as vice president and then president of Interval Research. She has served in recent years on the National Academies' Science Technology and Economic Policy Board, College of Engineering Advisory Board at the University of California, Berkeley, and the red team of DARPA's Defense Sciences Research Council.

Arati is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Throughout a career spanning public service and the commercial technology sector, her service to national security has been enormous and incomparable.

Blog By Chithra Prabhakaran