Program Manager
Microsystems Technology Office
Todd Bauer, Ph.D., joined DARPA in January 2023 as a program manager in the Microsystems Technology Office. His professional interests include radiation-hardened microsystems, microsystems fabrication, and supply chain assurance.
Bauer serves as a distinguished member of technical staff in the Microsystems Engineering, Science and Applications (MESA) Complex at Sandia National Laboratories. At Sandia, he’s developed technologies ranging from sensors to security, while also serving as a process and integration engineer in MESA’s microfabrication facilities.
Education
- Ph.D., Chemical and Nuclear Engineering, University of New Mexico
His graduate research focus was low-temperature plasmas for materials processing.
Ideas under incubation
- Circuits On Demand: How can we achieve on-demand, custom integrated circuits for low-volume, niche defense applications? What design and manufacturing advances can we imagine that would displace incumbent state of the art design and microfabrication processes?
- Photonic Reconfigurable Inference and Scalable Module: Can we develop a scalable, general-purpose 3D optoelectronic platform for energy-efficient, high-density parallel computation? What are the technology enablers to improve scaling, compute density, and energy efficiency with photonic integrated circuits?
- Synthetic Biology for AI-Driven Manufacturing: Can we accelerate biosynthesis using biological neural networks to develop new materials or explore frontiers for computation? Can we leverage recent advances in synthetic biology and biological neural networks to realize complex, error-tolerant, non-linear circuits for analog computation?