The audacity incubator: 20 years of YFA

Voices

• Bartlett Russell, office director, Defense Sciences Office
• Evelyn Wang, vice president for energy and climate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (YFA class of 2007)
• Suo Yang, associate professor of mechanical engineering, University of Minnesota (YFA class of 2021)
• Zico Kolter, professor and head of the machine learning department, Carnegie Mellon University (YFA class of 2017)
• Host: Tim Haynes, Public Affairs

What happens when DARPA bets on early-career scientists with fresh ideas and gives them a chance to solve real world problems?

For 20 years, DARPA’s Young Faculty Award (YFA) has connected rising researchers at academic institutions with DARPA program managers, national security challenges, and the opportunity to pursue ambitious science. In this episode, we look back at two decades of YFA with DSO Director Bart Russell and three YFA alumni whose early DARPA-funded research and mentorship helped launch careers across academia, industry, and government.

In this episode, we discuss how YFA:

• Helped Dr. Evelyn Wang turn early research on cooling high-power electronics into a career advancing high-impact energy technologies, including as the head of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E)
• Gave Suo Yang the mentorship and support to tackle an engineering problem that had been virtually untouched for 50 years: modeling and predicting sonic booms generated by hypersonic (Mach 5+) speeds
• Enabled Zico Kolter to explore a contrarian idea about machine-learning optimization that helped shape his work as a tech entrepreneur and thought leader in safety and security for large language models

Tune in to hear how DARPA’s Young Faculty Award has become an incubator not only for audacious ideas, but also for the people — and future generations of researchers — who bring those audacious ideas to life.

Bonus: Hear directly from Thomas Kenny, the professor who encouraged Evelyn Wang to pursue YFA, in his Life After DARPA interview.

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Media with inquiries should contact DARPA Public Affairs at outreach@darpa.mil