Arati Prabhakar has made India proud after she was appointed the head of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA. DARPA is American equivalent of DRDO in India, only differences being that the US counterpart is heavily funded with greater powers.

The New Delhi born, Arati, went to US at the age of 3 and was brought up in Texas. With a degree in Applied Physics, she also pursued a PhD inthe same from the highest ranked university in America, Caltech.

DARPA is nicknamed Pentagon's Mad Science or Blue Sky research agency for the bohemian and futuristic technologies that it develops with a view to apply them in the defence. One such futuristic idea of November 2011 was a symposium which brought together people and propelled them to ponder deeply about space travel.

Apart from the numerous technologies and defense related projects uptaken by the organization, it is popular among the geeky nerds for developing the computer networking, hypertexting system, and GUI (Graphical User Interface) all of which are indispensible in today's world of modern computing and web. DARPA is strikingly different from DRDO in another aspect, laboratories. DARPA doesn't own any labs and instead spends more than $3 billion for funding research in numerous firms that have facilities for technology development.

Arati was an employee in DARPA for 7 years before 1993. Bill Clinton had identified the potential she had and appointed her as the head of National Institute of Standards and Technology. Later on she was a part of a venture capital firm which concentrated on funding green technology and IT.

There was some controversy of the capital firm which was funding Solyndra, a firm dealing with Solar Energy which also received the support of Obama and his administration. However, the firm collapsed last year.

US officials have made the necessary investigation and decided that she was the right person for the position and that she had no involvement in the Solyndra deal.

AW - Anil