Arati Prabhakar Age, Husband, Children, Family, Biography & More

Some Lesser Known Facts About Arati Prabhakar

• Arati Prabhakar is an American government official who was appointed as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on 3 October 2022 and was also designated as the chief science advisor to the President of America, Joe Biden. She is a former head of DARPA, the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. She founded a non-profit organisation Actuate in 2018 and works as its CEO. She was the first woman to head the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 1993 to 1997. ^[2]Campuspubs

• Arati Prabhakar was born in Delhi; however, she moved with her mother from India to the United States when she was three years old. Her mother shifted from India to the US to pursue a master’s degree in social services administration at the University of Chicago. When she was ten years old, her family moved to Lubbock, Texas, where she grew up. According to Arati Prabhakar, when she was very young, her mother encouraged her to pursue a PhD in future. In 1984, she became the first woman to earn a PhD in applied physics from Caltech. In 2020, in an interview with a media house, Arati Prabhakar added that her mother, who was a social worker, was in her early thirties when she divorced Arati’s father. Arati recalled,
  

  My parents were married in India in 1950 just as the country was forming and standing up as an independent nation. They had an arranged marriage, and it was an unhappy marriage. They later divorced, something that was inconceivable for an arranged marriage in 1950 from India, but that would happen many, many years later. I have a particularly unusual mother.”

  

  Arati Prabhakar in a newspaper article

• Soon after receiving her PhD degree in 1984, Arati Prabhakar started working as a Congressional Fellow and Analyst at Office of Technology Assessment, Washington, District Of Columbia and worked there till 1986 as an intern. She was also the recipient of a fellowship from the Bell Laboratories Graduate Research Program for Women. 

• According to Prabhakar, her father worked at Texas Instruments and was a PhD recipient from SMU, Southern Methodist University, in Dallas. Later, her father shifted to Lubbock after he was appointed as a faculty member at Texas Tech.

• From 1986 to 1993, she served as a Program Manager at DSO and Director at MTO in Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Arlington, Virginia. In 1993, she was appointed as the Director at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland and worked there till 1997.

• From 1997 to 1998, Arati Prabhakar served as the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Raychem, Menlo Park, California. From 1998 to 2000, she served as the vice president and later president of Interval Research, Palo Alto, California. 

• In 2001, Arati Prabhakar joined U.S. Venture Partners in Menlo Park, California as its Partner and served in the position till 2011. In this company, she was given the responsibility to look after the investment programs in green technology and information technology startups in the US.

• In July 2012, Arati Prabhakar was appointed as the Director of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Virginia. She served in the position till January 2017. In September 2017, she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford, CA till June 2018.
  

  Arati Prabhakar at DARPA

• In 2018, Arati Prabhakar founded a non-profit organisation Actuate Innovation, which focuses on modelling new forms of innovations for the challenges faced by the society and began working as its Cheif Executive Officer.

• According to Arati Prabhakar, she is a frequent TED talk speaker and ofen speaks about the new innovations of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) since November 2015.

• In June 2022, during a media discussion, Arati Prabhakar disclosed that she would be a part of American President Joe Biden’s cancer moonshot initiative in the future.
  

  Arati Prabhakar while attending a press meet

• Arati Prabhakar is associated with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the National Academy of Engineering in America, the governing board for the Pew Research Center, the U.S. National Academies of Science Technology, and the Economic Policy Board as a member. In 1997, she was a Fellow for the research work titled “leadership in partnering between industry and government to promote economic growth through the development of manufacturing technologies for semiconductor devices.”

• Arati Prabhakar is the recipient of the title ‘Texas Tech Distinguished Engineer and a Distinguished Alumna of California Institute of Technology.’

• In 2012, Arati Prabhakar was appointed as a member of the board of directors of SRI International, a member of the U.S. National Academies’ Science Technology and Economic Policy Board, and the College of Engineering Advisory Board at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Once, Arati Prabhakar was featured in the Notable Women in Computing cards.

• Craig Fields, a former director of Darpa, stated in a media conversation that Arati Prabhakar had the ability to deal with military customers while understanding their needs at the same time. He added,
  

  Ms Prabhakar has the unusual combination of technical knowledge, entrepreneurial flair and the ability to get things done within government in an agency that emphasized individual responsibility. She had the ability to work with her military customers and understand the needs of the companies involved. She was able to think about long-term goals at the same time, which is a pretty rare set of skills.”

• On 1 October 2022, Arati Prabhakar was appointed as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and President Joe Biden’s science adviser. Upon holding this position, she became the is the first woman, first immigrant, and first person of colour to serve as the director of OSTP.
  

  Arati Prabhakar while sworn in as the new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and President Joe Biden’s science adviser in 2022