US President Joe Biden has appointed Aarti Prabhakar as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as his chief science advisor. Born on February 2, 1959, Aarti’s family was only three years old when she moved to America from New Delhi. His mother crossed the Seven Seas with her young child to pursue a degree in social work in Chicago.
Prabhakar received his early education in Lubuck, Texas and was deeply influenced by his mother, who from a very young age encouraged him to read a lot. The result of his encouragement was that at the age of only 25, Aarti mastered the esoteric subject like ‘Applied Science’.
Talking about Aarti Prabhakar’s higher education, she did her Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Texas Tech University in 1979.
He received his Master of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1980 and a PhD in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1984. She was the first woman to earn a PhD in Applied Physics from this prestigious institute. After doing her PhD, Aarti Prabhakar moved to Washington on a Congressional Fellowship, working with the Office of Technology Appraisal from 1984 to 1986.
From 1986 she began working at DARPA as a program manager and remained at the institute for seven years, but when she left the institute in 1993 she became the founding director of the Office of Microelectronics Technology. At the age of 34, Prabhakar was appointed the head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She held this position from 1993 to 1997.
From 1997 to 1998 she was Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Racham, and then Chair of Interval Research until 2000. Her focus was on investing in green technology and information technology startups, and in 2001 she joined US Venture Partners to create a better environment for this. On 30 July 2012, she was appointed head of DARPA, replacing Regina E Dugan, after nearly ten years in this ambitious position.
Prabhakar was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford in 2017-18. In 2019, he started Actuate, a non-profit organization to explore new ways of tackling society’s challenges. Prabhakar, who believes in returning what she has taken from the society, is known to be a tough officer and a friendly person and experts believe that Aarti Prabhakar’s experience in engineering will help in the challenges ahead in the field of defense and science. would be helpful in handling.