[Infowarrior] - DARPA’s Regina Dugan Will Join Google

[Richard Forno]

DARPA’s Regina Dugan Will Join Google

Published on March 12, 2012 
by Liz Gannes

http://allthingsd.com/?p=184980&ak_action=printable

Regina Dugan, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is leaving to take a role at Google. We’d been working on this story independently and have confirmed it with Google; Wired has it up as well.

Dugan reigned over all sorts of fantastical creations at DARPA, including testing hypersonic vehicles. She was a huge hit at our D9 conference last year, and recently delighted the audience at TED with a presentation of an array of projects, including a remote-controlled flying hummingbird.

Dugan had an unusually entrepreneurial philosophy for someone in the government, for instance telling our own Walt Mossberg at D, “Failure isn’t the problem, it’s the fear of failure.”

A spokeswoman for Google said that Dugan would have a “senior position” at Google but wouldn’t confirm her role. A DARPA spokesperson told Wired that Dugan felt she couldn’t turn down a chance to join such an innovative company.

Google has recently — mostly in secret — combined some of its moonshot projects into a division called Google X, which is run by co-founder Sergey Brin. It is working on things like wearable computing devices and autonomous cars. Seems like a natural fit for Dugan, though of course Google wouldn’t confirm it.


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