Dr. Ken Gabriel - DARPA
Dr. Ken Gabriel, Deputy Director (at the time of TDIA), accepts on behalf of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is honored for its role in creating, founding and funding of the Internet.
Dr. Ken Gabriel is currently president and CEO of The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc., an independent not-for-profit research institution that develops innovative solutions to some of the nation’s most critical problems in national security, space, biomedical systems, and energy. Dr. Gabriel was most recently the deputy director of the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group at Google, which he helped establish when he joined the organization in 2012 as corporate vice president at Google/Motorola Mobility. From 2009 to 2012, Dr. Gabriel was the deputy director, and then acting director, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the Department of Defense, where he led an agency with an annual budget of $3 billion that is charged with managing the Department’s portfolio of its most cutting edge projects to both create and avoid technology surprise.
Dr. Gabriel has been a tenured professor in both the Robotics Institute and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He also served as a program manager and office director at DARPA, where he conceived and led projects that took MEMS out of the laboratory into practical applications. Earlier in his career, he was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, a research scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory, and a research principal investigator at AT&T Bell Laboratories. His other honors include being named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum at Davos, named to the Senior Executive Service, and awarded the Carlton Tucker Prize for Excellence in Teaching from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Gabriel holds SM and ScD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.