In the two years since her appointment as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Arati Prabhakar has set the United States on a course to regulate artificial intelligence. The IEEE fellow advised U.S. President Joe Biden in drafting the executive order he issued to achieve that goal, just six months after she took office in 2022.
Prabhakar is the first woman and the first person of color to serve as OSTP director, and she has broken glass ceilings at other agencies as well. She was the first woman to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
A job in the public sector was not an option for her at first. It was only when she became a program manager at DARPA in 1986 that she really understood what she could achieve as a government official, she says.
“What I have come to appreciate about public service is the opportunity to shape policy on a scale that is truly unprecedented,” she says.
Prabhakar’s passion for addressing societal challenges by developing technologies also led her to take on leadership roles at companies such as Raychem (now part of TE Connectivity), Interval Research Corp., and US Venture Partners. In 2019, she co-founded Actuate, a nonprofit in Palo Alto, California, that seeks to develop technologies to address climate change, privacy, access to healthcare, and other pressing issues.
“I really appreciate having seen science, technology and innovation from all sorts of perspectives,” she says. “But what I love most is public service because it can have so much impact and reach.”
Discovering her passion for electrical engineering
Prabhakar, who was born in India and raised in Texas, says she chose a career in STEM because her childhood classmates said women shouldn’t work in science, technology, engineering or math.
“That only strengthened my desire to pursue it,” she says. Her parents, who wanted her to become a doctor, supported her in studying engineering, she adds.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Texas Tech University in Lubbock in 1979, she moved to California to continue her education at Caltech. She earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1980 and a doctorate in applied physics in 1984. Her doctoral thesis focused on research into deep defects and impurities in semiconductors that affect device performance.
After earning her PhD, she wanted her research to have a bigger impact than academia allowed, so she applied for a policy fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science to work at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. The office studies issues related to new or emerging technologies, assesses their impact, and examines whether new policies are warranted.
“We have big goals for the future – such as curbing climate change – that science and technology must help achieve.”
“I wanted to share my research on semiconductor manufacturing processes with others,” says Prabhakar. “It was exciting and valuable for me.”
She was accepted into the program and moved to Washington, DC. During her year-long fellowship, she conducted a study on microelectronics R&D for the Subcommittee on Research and Technology of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. The subcommittee oversees STEM-related issues, including education, policy, and standards.
There, she worked with people who were passionate about public service and government, but she didn’t feel that way herself, she says, until she joined DARPA. As a program manager, Prabhakar founded and led several projects, including a microelectronics office that invests in developing new technologies in areas such as lithography, optoelectronics, infrared imaging and neural networks.
In 1993, she says, an opportunity arose that she couldn’t turn down: President Bill Clinton nominated her to head the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST develops technical guidelines and conducts research to develop tools that improve the quality of life of citizens. At age 34, she became the first woman to head the agency.
After leading NIST during the first Clinton administration, she moved into the private sector, where her roles included CTO at home appliance component maker Raychem in Menlo Park, California, and president of private R&D lab Interval Research in Palo Alto, California. In total, she spent the next 14 years in the private sector, primarily as a partner at US Venture Partners in Menlo Park, where she invested in semiconductor and cleantech startups.
In 2012, she returned to DARPA and became its first female director.
“When I got the call offering the job, I held my breath,” says Prabhakar. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a difference at an agency I loved earlier in my career. And it turned out to be as meaningful an experience as I had hoped.”
She spent the next five years leading the agency, focusing on developing better military systems and the next generation of artificial intelligence, as well as creating solutions in the social sciences, synthetic biology and neurotechnology.
Under her leadership, DARPA established the Biological Technologies Office in 2014 to oversee basic and applied research in areas such as genome editing, neuroscience and synthetic biology. The office launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform, which helped fund the development of the mRNA technology used in Moderna and Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccines.
She left the agency in 2017 to return to California with her family.
“When I left the organization, I was very aware that the United States has the most powerful engine of innovation the world has ever seen,” says Prabhakar. “At the same time, I was always conscious that we have big goals for the future – like curbing climate change – that science and technology must help achieve.”
That’s why she helped found Actuate in 2019. She served as the nonprofit’s executive director until she took on the role of OSTP director in 2022.
Although she didn’t choose her career path out of passion, she says she realized she loves the role that engineering, science and technology play in the world because they “have the power to change the way the future unfolds.”
US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm (left) and Arati Prabhakar announce that Department of Energy researchers have achieved a breakthrough in nuclear fusion in 2022.
Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images
Leading AI regulation worldwide
When Biden asked Prabhakar if she would accept the OSTP job, she said she didn’t think twice. “When should I move in?” she told him.
“I was so excited to work for the President because he sees science and technology as a necessary part of creating a bright future for the country,” says Prabhakar.
A month after she took office, the generative AI program ChatGPT was launched and became a hot topic.
“AI was already being used in a variety of areas, but suddenly it became visible to everyone in a way that had never been the case before,” she says.
Regulating AI has become a priority for the Biden administration, she says, because of the breadth and power of the technology and the rapid pace at which it is being developed.
Prabhakar led the drafting of Biden’s executive order on the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence. The order, signed on October 30, 2022, outlines goals such as protecting consumers and their privacy from AI systems, developing watermarking systems for AI-generated content, and deterring intellectual property theft through the use of generative models.
“The executive order is perhaps the most important achievement in terms of AI,” says Prabhakar. “It is a tool that mobilizes the executive branch (of the U.S. government) and recognizes that such systems pose security risks, but it also opens up tremendous opportunities. The order has put the branches of government on a very constructive path toward regulation.”
Meanwhile, the United States has pushed a UN resolution to make AI regulation an international priority. The United Nations passed this measure last March. In addition to setting regulations, AI will also be used to advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
“There is still a lot of work to be done,” says Prabhakar, “but I am very pleased with what the President has achieved and I am really proud to have been able to help.”
