US President Joe Biden has nominated Indian-American scientist Dr. Arati Prabhakar as the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
At the age of 34, Prabhakar was appointed the head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She is also a former director at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which gave birth to breakthrough technologies like stealth aircraft and the Internet.
Prabhakar was unanimously confirmed by the Senate before to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and she was the first woman to hold that role. She will also be selected as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and will be the President's Chief Advisor for Science and Technology.
“I share Dr. Prabhakar’s belief that America has the most powerful innovation machine the world has ever seen. As the Senate considers her nomination, I am grateful that Dr. Alondra Nelson will continue to lead OSTP and Dr. Francis Collins will continue to serve as my acting Science Advisor,” President Biden said in the statement.
As the director of DARPA, Prabhakar oversaw teams that prototyped a system for detecting nuclear and radiological materials before a terrorist can build a bomb, as well as developed tools to find human trafficking networks in the deep and dark web, and other tools which enabled complex military systems to work together, even when they were not originally designed to do so.
She also established a new office to spur novel biotechnologies and kick-started the development of a rapid-response mRNA vaccine platform, making possible the fastest, safest and most effective development of a vaccine in world history, in response to COVID-19.