Program Manager
Defense Sciences Office
Michael McDonald, Ph.D., joined DARPA in October 2025. His interests include plasma science, diagnostics, and engineering; spacecraft power, propulsion, and thermal management; and artificial intelligence (AI) interpretability, with a focus on application to scientific discovery.
Before joining DARPA, McDonald was a rocket scientist in the Spacecraft Propulsion Section at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. While there, he founded and led the Space Technology and Applications Research Lab, known as STARLab, which specialized in creating and characterizing energetic flows for propulsion and extreme environment simulation.
McDonald’s aspirations for DARPA include developing material solutions for systems in reactive and oxygenic environments, rapid qualification methods for high-power spacecraft propulsion systems, National Institute of Standards and Technology-traceable plasma diagnostics, AI self-learning methods for plasma state measurement and collisional-radiative model development (i.e., AlphaFold-style models for plasma), scalable AI mechanistic interpretability techniques to verifiably decipher or distill neural networks in human-understandable terms, and many more things yet to be discovered.
Education
- Ph.D., Applied Physics, University of Michigan
- B.S., Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan
- B.S., Engineering Physics, University of Michigan