I’ve always been impressed with the research sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and as of today ResearchScorecard displays life sciences researchers at Stanford that have been funded by DARPA after 2000.

Granted, there aren’t many of those in the bio realm (see bottom table). So why bother? Well, it’s safe to say that these scientists are likely to become trendsetters if they aren’t already. This is based on the notion that DARPA will fund you because your project is both ambitious enough AND just might work, a combination that is typically difficult to achieve with conventional funding. This is because DARPA doesn’t work via a review committee as do NSF or NIH. Instead, you have to get approval from a program manager (a very senior and experienced scientist) to submit a proposal following a DARPA RFP. This proposal has to convince the program manager, who then has to convince the head of DARPA for things to move forward. As long as the administrators are smart and schrewd, this can lead to surprising results, as this process diminishes barriers to creativity often encountered when trying to convince committees (the more folks to convince, the more likely one of them will object to your proposal). And sure enough, the results speak for themselves: the Internet, desktop graphical user interfaces, stealth, GPS and cars that drive themselves are several among many examples.

Note that the dollar amounts for those grants or contracts aren’t listed in our database, as the amounts are not easily decipherable. Furthermore, I don’t believe the number is critical for the goal here: The imprimatur given by DARPA is sufficient to indicate that the recipient is a markee scientist, in my opinion. Let us know if you think otherwise.

DARPA funding data can be found in Researcher Profile and Department Profile reports for biomedical researchers at Stanford University for 2001 onward.  Use Tools Researcher by Name to get details for individual scientists. You can also use Tools Funding History.