Arati Prabhakar

Arati Prabhakar is engineer and applied physicist with broad management and leadership experience in the private and public sectors. She 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 new solutions for critical challenges.

Prabhakar served as Science and Technology Advisor to President Joe Biden, simultaneously serving as the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and a member of the President’s Cabinet, and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). She helped lead the Cancer Moonshot and stand up the new ARPA-H agency to fast-track health advances.

Previously, Prabhakar served as director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Under her leadership, DARPA kick-started the development of a rapid-response mRNA vaccine platform that later made the mRNA COVID vaccine possible. She was also director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In the private sector, she was chief technology officer for a specialty materials manufacturer, a venture capitalist investing in startups in semiconductors and cleantech, and the founder of an innovation nonprofit.

Prabhakar 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.

She earned her electrical engineering degree from Texas Tech University and then an M.S. in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology. She started her career in the legislative branch as a Congressional Fellow at the Office of Technology Assessment.