Deputy Director
Directors Office
Tyler McQuade rejoined DARPA in August 2025 as the agency’s deputy director.
He most recently served as the chief of research and development at On Demand Pharmaceuticals, as well as an advisor to leadership at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), providing guidance on how to find and nurture program manager candidates.
He previously served at DARPA from 2013-2017, first as a program manager, during which he focused on the acceleration of new molecule discovery for medical, military, and civilian applications, and then as the deputy director and acting office director for DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.
Immediately following his DARPA tenure, Tyler joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Medicines for All Institute as Chief Technology Officer and Virginia Commonwealth University as a professor of chemistry and life science engineering.
Prior to joining DARPA in 2013, McQuade was a professor of chemistry. During his academic career, McQuade received numerous awards, including the Beckman Young Investigator and MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35. In addition, McQuade was a visiting group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and a visiting professor in the Food and Nutrition Toxicology Department at the ETH-Zurich.
He was a National Institutes of Health Post-Doctoral Fellow at MIT prior to his independent research career.
Education
- Ph.D., Chemistry, University of Wisconsin
- B.S., Chemistry and Biology, University of California, Irvine
