The Defense Sciences Office (DSO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) manages and maintains a suite of strategic thrusts in biomedicine and biotechnology. This portfolio is made up of four main areas: performance optimization, restoration from injury, transformation of battlefield medicine, and defense against biological agents. Performance optimization programs allow warfighter to counter harsh environmental and combat conditions and ensure performance even if undergoing sleep deprivation, temperature extremes, muscle fatigue, inadequate nutrition, or data overload with a goal to “Deploy at Peak, Stay at Peak.” Additionally, programs in this strategic thrusts aim to diagnose and treat diseases prior to the emergence of symptoms and diagnose and treat injuries due to exposure to explosive blast, rarely seen in the civilian setting. Restoration of physical and cognitive function programs include comprehensively approaches to address complex tissue trauma, allowing for the regeneration of nerves, muscle, skin, and bone as well as a prosthetics program that will develop a neural-controlled upper extremity prosthetic that fully recapitulates the motor function of a natural limb while incorporating sensory feedback. Transformation of battlefield medicine includes robotic systems for telemedicine and teleoperation that can be used in the evacuation setting, blood products that do not degrade over time, and more lightweight, portable equipment for the medic, such as a portable ventilator. Finally, DSO also has programs in biological warfare defense that seek to provide fast and widespread relief in case of epidemics. These programs include biodiscovery tools to quickly scale up therapeutics from the benchtop to the manufacturing plant as well as rapid methods of vaccine production and assessment that explore new forms of generating critical countermeasures. These strategic thrusts are enables by an aggressive pursuit of cutting-edge basic and applied research in disparate fields such as physics, mathematics, and engineering and further the DSO transformation of the biomedical sciences.
As a program manager and, currently, Deputy Director of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, Dr. Christodoulou has applied his research expertise to developing revolutionary, new materials capabilities for the U.S. military. He pioneered the accelerated development of multifunctional materials to realize a revolutionary class of unmanned micro air vehicles culminating in the “Wasp,” which is being used by U.S. forces today. His Prognosis program, which is transitioning to the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy, exploits the basic scientific understanding of damage accumulation in materials to define the true state of individual weapon platforms based on actual missions and usage, and will dramatically extend the useful fleet life of those platforms. His Structural Amorphous Materials program has developed an entirely new class of materials – amorphous metals – that have demonstrated exceptional damage tolerance and corrosion resistance for a wide variety of applications. And his Hardwire armor program, currently being used to protect U.S. troops in Iraq, rapidly identified and exploited commercially available materials – arranged in new and unique architectures – to provide outstanding vehicle armor capabilities.