Find Funding in Science & Engineering: Working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (2022)
Are you interested in doing research at the leading edge of science and technology? The Defense Sciences Office (DSO) within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) identifies and pursues high-risk, high-payoff research initiatives across a broad spectrum of science and engineering disciplines and transforms them into important, new game-changing technologies for national security. Current DSO themes include frontiers in math, computation and design, limits of sensing and sensors, complex social systems, and anticipating capabilities for current and future threats.
In this virtual presentation to the BU research community (moderated by Dr. Tom Bifano, Director of the BU Photonics Center), Dr. Philip Root, director of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office and former acting director of the Defense Sciences Office, will provide an overview of DARPA, how to work with DARPA, the DSO, and the Strategic Technology Office, as well as the agency’s current research activities and interests. Faculty will leave the talk with a better understanding of how to share their research with DARPA program managers and the types of research DARPA is interested in supporting.
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About DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was established in 1958 to prevent strategic surprise by ensuring the U.S. remains at the forefront of the scientific and technological frontier. To fulfill its mission, the Agency relies on diverse performers to apply multi-disciplinary approaches to both advance knowledge through basic research and create innovative technologies that address current problems through applied research. As the Defense Department’s primary innovation engine, DARPA undertakes projects that are finite in duration but that create lasting change related to national security as well as the broader science and technology community.
About the Speaker
Army Lt. Col. (ret) Philip Root, PhD, was named director of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office (STO) in February 2022. He previously served as deputy director of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office and its acting director from June 2019 until moving to STO. He previously served as program manager within the DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office (TTO) where he explored the intersection of AI, autonomy, and military operations. His former TTO programs include the Squad X program, Urban Reconnaissance through Supervised Autonomy (URSA), the ALIAS aircrew autonomy program, the Mobile Force Protection counter-UAS program, the Underminer tactical tunneling program, and the DSO Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program. He maintains responsibility for the legal, moral, and ethical (LME) analysis of the URSA program as an exemplar for in-depth LME analysis of an autonomous system.
Before coming to DARPA, Root was the director of the Center for Innovation and Engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point where he oversaw cadet and faculty research in support of Army operations. As a research and development officer, Root has deployed to Afghanistan developing and implementing the hardware and software needed to support cloud-based military intelligence analytics. He served two years as an Astronaut Office support engineer at the Johnson Space Center where he had oversight responsibilities for the booster and launch abort system of the Constellation program intended to return Americans to the Moon. Root spent the nearly the first decade of his career as an Apache helicopter pilot in Germany and Korea. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, and he received his Master of Science and doctorate from MIT at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).