Dr. William Chappell is director of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). Serving in this position since June 2014, he has focused the office on three key thrusts important to national security: ensuring unfettered use of the electromagnetic spectrum, building an alternative business model for acquiring advanced DoD electronics that feature built-in trust, and developing circuit architectures for next-generation machine learning.
From these thrusts, Dr. Chappell has pulled individual programs to serve as the foundation of the Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI), MTO’s answer to engineering and economics challenges that could affect the progress made in microelectronics technology over the past 50 years. Under the title of Page 3 Investments, a name inspired by Gordon Moore’s seminal 1965 paper, ERI will commit hundreds of millions of dollars to nurture research in advanced new materials, circuit design tools, and system architectures.
Prior to his role as MTO director, he managed DARPA programs on adaptable radio frequency (RF) systems and low-cost antenna array technologies.
Before joining DARPA, he served as a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of Purdue University, where he led the Integrated Design of Electromagnetically-Applied Systems (IDEAS) Laboratory. His research focused on high-frequency components, specifically the unique integration of RF and microwave components based on electromagnetic analysis.
Dr. Chappell served as the advisor for several best paper finalists at the International Microwave Symposium, hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Microwave Theory and Techniques Society. He has coauthored two best papers at the GOMACTech conference and, in 2009, his paper on wearable, multiple-input and multiple-output systems was selected for the best journal paper at that year’s conference of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society.
He received his Bachelor of Science (summa cum laude), Master of Science, and Doctorate of Philosophy degrees in Electrical Engineering, all from the University of Michigan.
