Mechanical engineer and defense entrepreneur Regina Dugan has been named the new director of Darpa, the Pentagon’s premiere research arm.
Previous director Tony Tether was relieved of the post in February, after serving the longest-ever term as DARPA director. Dugan will have some big shoes to fill. Tether presided over the DARPA Grand Challenge and an enormous jump in prosthetics technology, among many other groundbreaking research projects.
But Dugan is no slouch. She has a PhD from the California Institute of Technology, and did a 4-year stint as program manager at DARPA’s Defense Science Office (which is like DARPA's DARPA, the nexus of the truly eyebrow-raising research) from 1996 to 2000. Her research there included robot swarms. In 2001, according to Danger Room, she formed RedX, "a company that builds security gear, including an explosives detector which relies on fluorescent ink."
The full scoop is at Danger Room, which was also the first to speculate that she would be the top pick for the post.