People
Directors Office
Jinendra Ranka, Ph.D., joined DARPA as the director of the Defense Sciences Office in February 2022.
Prior to joining DARPA, he was the CEO and a founding partner of JASR Systems.
Ranka has 25 years of experience in academic, commercial, and government research and development. He was a technical staff member at Bell Labs, Sycamore Networks, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He served as a program manager in the Strategic Technology Office at DARPA and as a deputy office director at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). He has 40+ publications with over 5,000 citations and numerous patents.
He is a fellow of Optica and served as a deputy editor for Optics Letters. He is widely recognized for his discovery of supercontinuum generation in optical fibers and the ability to drastically modify the dispersive properties of waveguide structures into regimes previously not thought possible.
Education
- Ph.D., Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University
- B.S., Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology