President Biden to Nominate Dr. Arati Prabhakar to Lead Office of Science and Technology Policy

Former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National Institute of Standards and Technology leader would make history as the first woman, immigrant, or person of color confirmed to head OSTP

Today, President Biden announced his intent to nominate Dr. Arati Prabhakar to serve as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and once confirmed to this position, also as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. In this capacity, Dr. Prabhakar will be the President’s Chief Advisor for Science and Technology, a co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and a member of the President’s Cabinet.

“Dr. Prabhakar is a brilliant and highly-respected engineer and applied physicist and will lead the Office of Science and Technology Policy to leverage science, technology, and innovation to expand our possibilities, solve our toughest challenges, and make the impossible possible,” said President Biden. “I share Dr. Prabhakar’s belief that America has the most powerful innovation machine the world has ever seen. As the Senate considers her nomination, I am grateful that Dr. Alondra Nelson will continue to lead OSTP and Dr. Francis Collins will continue to serve as my acting Science Advisor.”

Prabhakar has been unanimously confirmed by the Senate before, to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and was the first woman to hold that role. She later served as director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the birthplace of breakthrough technologies like stealth aircraft and the Internet.

If confirmed to lead OSTP, Prabhakar would become the third Asian American, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander to serve in President Biden’s Cabinet, joining Vice President Kamala Harris and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. Today’s nomination is historic, with Prabhakar being the first woman, immigrant, or person of color nominated to serve as Senate-confirmed director of OSTP.

Dr. Arati Prabhakar, nominee to serve as Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy

Dr. Arati Prabhakar has led two different federal R&D agencies and worked with startups, large companies, universities, government labs, and nonprofits across a wide variety of sectors to create powerful new solutions for critical challenges. She is an engineer and applied physicist with extensive management and leadership credentials.

Prabhakar served as director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, from 2012 to 2017. At DARPA, she oversaw teams that prototyped a system for detecting nuclear and radiological materials before a terrorist can build a bomb, that developed tools to find human trafficking networks in the deep and dark web, and that enabled complex military systems to work together even when they were not originally designed to do so. She also established a new office to spur novel biotechnologies. Under her leadership, DARPA kick-started the development of a rapid-response mRNA vaccine platform, making possible the fastest safe and effective vaccine development in world history in response to COVID-19.

Prabhakar was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), taking the helm at age 34 as the first woman to lead the agency. At NIST, which she led from 1993 to 1997, she helped take from early seed stage to national scale the Manufacturing Extension Partnership to boost the competitiveness of small- and mid-size manufacturers, and the Advanced Technology Program to stimulate early-stage advanced technology development. She also reinforced NIST’s long-time mission in measurement science and technology that underpins commerce and high-quality manufacturing.

Between her Federal leadership roles, Prabhakar spent 15 years in Silicon Valley, helping bring R&D to deployment as a company executive and as a venture capitalist. Her work included components for consumer electronics and semiconductor process technology. In 2019, she founded Actuate, a non-profit organization bringing new actors to the table to develop solutions to the challenges of climate, health, trustworthy data and information technology, and opening access to opportunity for every person.

Prabhakar’s family immigrated from India to the United States when she was three years old – first to Chicago and then settling when she was age 10 in Lubbock, Texas, where she went on to get her electrical engineering degree from Texas Tech University. She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology, where she also earned an M.S. in electrical engineering. She started her career in the legislative branch as a Congressional Fellow at the Office of Technology Assessment.

She is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.