Arati Prabhakar is the 12th Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, appointed by President Biden and assuming office in October 2022. In this role, she also serves as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, is a member of the President’s Cabinet, and Co-Chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
An accomplished engineer and applied physicist, Prabhakar brings extensive leadership and management experience across government, industry, academia, and nonprofit sectors. She has led two federal research and development agencies and collaborated with startups, large corporations, universities, national laboratories, and nonprofit organizations to develop innovative solutions for critical societal challenges. She served as Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency from 2012 to 2017 and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 1993 as Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, becoming the first woman to lead the agency.
Between her federal leadership roles, Prabhakar spent 15 years in Silicon Valley as a company executive and venture capitalist. In 2019, she founded Actuate, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to advancing new approaches to innovation for society’s most pressing problems.
Born in India, Prabhakar’s family immigrated to the United States when she was three, first settling in Chicago and later in Lubbock, Texas, where she earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from Texas Tech University. She went on to receive an M.S. in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology. She began her career in public service as a Congressional Fellow at the Office of Technology Assessment.
Prabhakar is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 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 is currently a UC Berkeley School of Information and Goldman School of Public Policy Executive Fellow in Applied Technology Policy.
