Who Is Dr Arati Prabhakar? US President Biden's Chief Science And Technology Advisor

In an effort to advance science, technology, and innovation, US President Joe Biden selected Indian-American Dr Arati Prabhakar on Tuesday to serve as the next White House science adviser. Dr Prabhakar will be Biden's chief science and technology advisor, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and a member of the President's Cabinet if she is confirmed by the Senate.

Following the completion of her PhD, Arati Prabhakar relocated to Washington, D.C., where she worked for the Office of Technology Assessment as a congressional fellow from 1984 to 1986. From 1986 to 1993, Prabhakar worked for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, first as a programme manager and then as the organisation's first director of the Microelectronics Technology Office. Prabhakar was made the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at the age of 34, a position she held from 1993 to 1997. She served as senior vice president and chief technology officer at Raychem from 1997 to 1998 after leaving NIST. From 1998 to 2000, she served as Interval Research's vice president and subsequently president.

Who Is Dr Arati Prabhakar?

From 2001 through 2011, she worked with U.S. Venture Partners, where she specialised in funding information technology and green technology firms. She took over as DARPA's director on July 30, 2012, succeeding Regina E. Dugan. From 2017–18. Prabhakar worked as a fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS). She founded Actuate in 2019 as a nonprofit with the goal of encouraging open innovation for societal problems.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) elected Prabhakar a Fellow in 1997 for her "leadership in partnering between industry and government to promote economic growth through the development of manufacturing technologies for semiconductor devices." She is an engineering member of the National Academy. She has also received honours from Texas Tech as a Distinguished Engineer and from the California Institute of Technology as a Distinguished Alumna.

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She sits on the Pew Research Center's governing board and the Science, Technology, and Economic Policy Board of the U.S. National Academies. In addition to serving on the Science, Technology, and Economic Policy Board of the U.S. National Academies and the College of Engineering Advisory Board at the University of California, Berkeley, she served on the board of directors of SRI International in 2012.

Feature image credit: NDTV.