The new director of the Pentagon’s research arm is visiting university campuses in an effort to rebuild bridges that were damaged under the Bush administration. Regina E. Dugan, who was appointed in July to lead the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has already visited the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; UCLA; Virginia Tech; and Texas A&M. During the Bush administration, DARPA’s guidelines for financing basic research changed markedly, says Peter Harsha, director of governmental affairs for the Computing Research Association, a Washington organization that represents academic institutions. The agency shortened the period of research financing and tied it to one-year “go, no-go” decisions, undercutting longer-term projects. DARPA enforced classification of research or prepublication review on scientific papers, and it established strict U.S. citizenship requirements for some financing. “It sounds like a lot of that is changing now,” Harsha says.<\/p>\n
In her conversations with researchers, Dugan has noted the criticism of the shortened time horizon for DARPA financing and acknowledged that increasing classification of research lessened the impact of the agency’s technology on both civilian and military infrastructure. “University-based research is an important component of DARPA’s future activities,” Dugan said in a statement. “It is our goal to strengthen this partnership, enabling some of the best minds to serve with and in the government in the best interests of the nation and the U.S. Department of Defense.” On her visit to the California institutions, Dugan — a mechanical engineer who has conducted fundamental development work in chemical sensing technologies to detect explosives — spoke to small groups of faculty members from different departments in both the sciences and engineering. “She came by Berkeley and had a frank chat about the past and the future, and I’m pretty encouraged,” says David Patterson, a computer scientist at UC-Berkeley. “She seems to genuinely value academic input into the defense research enterprise and really wants to re-engage the research community in the DARPA mission.”<\/p>\n