WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 (UPI) -- A former military scientist and senior NASA official is being tapped to be the first chief scientific researcher for all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.
Lisa Porter was named as the first director of the new Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, in a statement from the Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell.
"This is an important milestone for the Intelligence Community," he said in the statement last week. "We are incredibly fortunate to have someone of Dr. Porter's stature take on this vital role."
Porter, of Scituate, Mass., is the associate administrator of NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, and co-chairman of the National Science & Technology Council's subcommittee on aeronautics.
She came to NASA from the Pentagon, where she was a senior scientist at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the entity on which the idea for IARPA was originally based.
According to the statement, IARPA "sponsors research aimed at game-changing breakthroughs and compliments the mission- specific science-and-technology research already being conducted by intelligence agencies."
IARPA, which got off to a rocky start last year, as a result of concerns that its exact mission and role was unclear, has been under two acting directors so far.
The current interim head, Tim Murphy, will continue at the agency as Porter's deputy. Murphy assumed the top spot in June 2007, when he replaced Steve Nixon after the latter was promoted to become director of science and technology for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Porter has a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in applied physics from Stanford University.
She has authored more than 25 publications in a broad range of technical disciplines including nuclear engineering, solar physics, plasma physics, computational materials modeling, explosives detection, and vibration control of flexible structures.
She will leave NASA Feb. 1, the agency said.
