ARATI PRABHAKAR, Ph.D.

Arati Prabhakar has spent her career funding and managing world-class engineers and scientists to create new technologies and businesses. She went to Washington, DC, in 1984 on a U.S. Congressional fellowship with the Office of Technology Assessment. She then served from 1986 to 1993 at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), first as a program manager and then as founding director of the Microelectronics Technology Office. In 1993, President Clinton appointed Arati the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where she led the 3,000-person organization in its work with companies across multiple industries. Arati came to Silicon Valley in 1997 to join Raychem, a publicly held specialty materials company, as senior vice president and chief technology officer. She was subsequently with Interval Research Corporation, a laboratory for consumer technology, as vice president and then president. In 2001, she joined U.S. Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California. As a partner at USVP until 2011, she worked with cleantech and IT entrepreneurs to help build new companies.

Arati chairs the Efficiency and Renewables Advisory Committee (ERAC) for the U.S. Department of Energy. She is also a member of the red team of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Research Council (DSRC), and a member of the College of Engineering Advisory Board at U.C. Berkeley. Arati received her B.S. in electrical engineering from Texas Tech University and an M.S. in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Caltech Distinguished Alumna.