Research and Development

This is an interview with Arati Prabhakar, founder and CEO of Actuate, a nonprofit organization that aims to accelerate American research and development systems. Prabhakar recounts her family’s Indian heritage, and her mother’s decision to immigrate to the United States on her own and pursue a degree in social work. She describes her childhood in Lubbock, Texas and describes being the only student with an Indian background in high school. Prabhakar discusses her undergraduate education at Texas Tech in Lubbock where she majored in electrical engineering, and she describes the opportunities leading to her graduate work in applied physics at Caltech where she worked with Tom McGill on developing quaternary materials. She explains that her interests in real-life problem solving led to a fellowship with the Office of Technology Assessment in Congress, which in turn led to her government service at DARPA. Prabhakar describes her initial work at DARPA on gallium arsenide technology, and she explains the impact of the end of the Cold War on DARPA and on her career. She explains the circumstances leading to her move to NIST to lead the Institute where she focused on building up the Advanced Technology Program and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Prabhakar discusses the personal and professional reasons she decided to move to California to work at Raychem in 1997 and then Interval Research, and then Venture Capital, where she worked on funding semiconductor research. She describes her interests in clean energy and how she came back to Washington to head DARPA where there was a major focus on clean energy and pandemic preparedness. Prabhakar explains how and why DARPA operates in the realm of biological research and how she navigated the existential paradox of a leading an agency built on nimbleness within the world’s largest bureaucracy. At the end of the interview, Prabhakar explains how her career in both the private and public sectors prepared her for her current interests in utilizing research and development to confront macrosocial challenges.

In this interview Robert Doering discusses topics such as: his family background and childhood; his undergraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Philip Morrison; Jack Rapaport; nuclear physics; doing his graduate work at Michigan State University; Sherwood Haynes; quantum mechanics taught by Mort Gordon; Aaron Galonsky; working at the cyclotron laboratory; George Bertsch; teaching at the University of Virginia; low-energy heavy-ion collisions; switching to industrial physics research; beginning work at Texas Instruments (TI); working with semiconductors; Don Redwine; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); George Heilmeier; Semiconductor Research Corporation; SEMATECH; Moore's Law; complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS); Birch Bayh and Robert Dole; Morris Chang; research and development changes throughout his career.

Gary Boyd is a physicist who has worked primarily in nonlinear optics and for 3M at its main campus in St. Paul, Minnesota. This interview was done as part of the American Institute of Physics History of Physicists in Industry project, and is a follow-up interview to one conducted in December 2003 by Tom Lassman. Boyd discusses his family and education, including graduate work in nonlinear optics under Yuen-Ron Shen at the University of California at Berkeley, but also summer work in experimental work in atmospheric physics. He discusses his decision to pursue a career in industry, and his inital hiring by the 3M Corporate Research Laboratory in the 1980s. He discusses different research project, the nature of industrial research and development, the professional transition to management, and some history of research and development at 3M.

David Arch is a physicist who has worked primarily on solid-state devices for Honeywell in Minnesota. This interview was done as part of the American Institute of Physicists in Industry project, and is a follow-up interview to one conducted in November 2005 by Joe Anderson and Orville Butler. The interview discusses Arch's family and youth in rural Illinois, undergraduate education at St. John's College in Minnesota, graduate work on lattice dynamics at Iowa State University under Constantine Stassis, experience working with the Ames Laboratory, and on neutron beams at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Arch was hired by Honeywell in 1980, and worked as a researcher in different laboratories in the Minneapolis area. The interview discusses his research and development project, his transition to management and business development positions, some corporate business and research history, and his recent transition to the assessment of prospective technologies.