Kathleen Fisher, PhD

Kathleen Fisher is the office director for DARPA’s Information Innovation Office.

Kathleen assumed the role of office director for DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) in May 2022. In this position, she leads program managers in the development of programs, technologies, and capabilities to ensure information advantage for the United States and its allies, and coordinates this work across the Department of Defense and U.S. government.

Fisher was previously the deputy office director for I2O from October 2021 to April 2022. This is Fisher’s second tour at DARPA, having previously served as a program manager in I2O from 2011 to 2014. As a program manager, she conceptualized, created, and executed programs in high-assurance computing and machine learning. Her High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS) and Probabilistic Programming for Advancing Machine Learning (PPAML) programs continue to benefit the Department of Defense and U.S. commercial industry.

Fisher joined DARPA from Tufts University, where she was a professor in the Department of Computer Science, and served as chair of the department from 2016 to 2021. Earlier in her career, she was a principal member of the technical staff at AT&T Labs Research.

She is a AAAS fellow and an ACM fellow. Fisher has served as chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) and as program chair for three of SIGPLAN’s marquee conferences: PLDI, OOPSLA, ICFP. She has also served as an associate editor for TOPLAS and as an editor of the Journal of Functional Programming.

Fisher has long been a leader in the effort to increase diversity and inclusion in computer science. She was co-chair of the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women (CRA-W) for three years, and she co-founded SIGPLAN’s Programming Language Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) series. Fisher is a recipient of the SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award. She is a past chair of DARPA’s Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group and a member of the Board of Trustees of Harvey Mudd College.

Fisher holds a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University.