STEFANIE TOMPKINS MSC’93, PHD’97 is the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research and development agency of the U.S. Department of Defense.

"I lead a high-risk, high-payoff research and development agency within the Department of Defense, charged with making pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. Past successes include the Saturn V rocket, stealth aircraft, the ARPANET (which became the internet), self-driving cars, and mRNA vaccines— we are working on what comes next! In my job, I see hundreds of new ideas across many technology domains and have to make critical judgments about which ones we are going to take risks on. Brown prepared me for this in three ways: first, by training me as a geologist, an incredibly diverse field that requires you to use many different STEM disciplines (math, chemistry, physics, engineering); second, by honing my capacity for critical thinking; and third, by providing amazing role models."

Brown-lifespan center for digital health utra award

Devon Newman ’25 received a Brown Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA) to work with Megan Ranney, MD, former deputy dean of Brown’s School of Public Health and founding director of the BrownLifespan Center for Digital Health, on two projects. The first tested a digital intervention to reduce intentional firearm injury among teens, and the second evaluated a text-based intervention to reduce depressive symptoms and peer conflict in at-risk adolescents. A public health major planning to pursue a career in medicine, Newman said that the research “fits in really well with my major and my interests, especially the gun violence study, because a lot of the sites where we’re doing the study are rural areas, and I’m very interested in rural public health as I come from a town of about 5,000.” He continued this research project for an independent study credit.

Duke University Amgen Scholars Program

Yannie Lam ’23 conducted pharmacology research as part of the Amgen Scholars Program, administered through the Office of Biomedical Graduate Education in the School of Medicine at Duke University. In addition to working in a lab, she attended weekly lectures given by researchers, spoke with current PhD students, and presented her research to other students and faculty at the Amgen Scholars North America Symposium at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The program made me want to pursue a PhD. I’d never done biochemical research before, so this was a really good lab environment where I got to try something new. I realized that I’m really interested in translational research where you figure out how to solve problems related to human disease.”

Angus Kingon, professor of entrepreneurship and engineering, and team member Ou Chen, associate professor of chemistry, will build upon research by Emeritus Professor Ted Morse that led to the development and patenting of a proof-of-concept novel x-ray scintillation detector, which has demonstrated both vastly improved resolution and a means of reducing the radiation dose rate. Their research will have implications for medical x-ray imaging, such as mammography, by lowering the x-ray dose and increasing the ability to detect abnormal features at an early stage. 

The Entrepreneur Connect Initiative, a project of Brown Technology Innovations (BTI), pairs seasoned entrepreneurs with faculty inventors to work on specific university intellectual properties with the goal of creating fundable start-ups. The entrepreneurs conduct customer discovery and bring a market perspective to the academic research, and the faculty inventors observe how the entrepreneurs approach their findings. 

Once the entrepreneur and inventor have brought a project to maturity, the Entrepreneur Connect Initiative markets the opportunity to interested investors, drawing on angel investors and venture capitalists from both groups’ networks. In cases in which BBII has provided financial and project management support for a research project, the BTI team offers guidance on how to achieve both scientific and business goals. 

The start-up XM Therapeutics is a good example of the initiative’s successful matchmaking. Members of the Entrepreneur Connect Initiative introduced entrepreneur Frank Ahmann to Jeffrey Morgan, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Brown who had developed a technology for making extracellular matrix particles for use in treating damaged tissue in various organs. Together they formed the Rhode Island-based XM Therapeutics; Ahmann became president and CEO.