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Dr. Gregory Kovacs Director

Dr. Kovacs received a BASc degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia, an MS degree in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD and an MD degree from Stanford University.

Dr. Kovacs has been on the Stanford faculty since 1991, most recently as Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by Courtesy, of Medicine. His laboratory has carried out a wide variety of projects in MEMS, mixed-signal electronics, medical instruments and space-related biomedical systems. His teaching experience covers undergraduate and graduate courses in analog circuit design, MEMS, biomedical engineering. In addition, he has considerable experience in K-12 outreach and enjoys teaching at all levels. Recently, he was involved in helping found Stanford’s Bioengineering department, designing and leading implementation of the core curriculum track. He has published extensively in technical literature, including authorship of an engineering textbook and several book chapters.

He received an NSF Young Investigator Award, held the Noyce Family Chair, and was a Terman and then University Fellow at Stanford. He was the Thomas V. Jones Faculty Development Scholar at Stanford. He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Until joining DARPA, he was a long-standing member of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Research Council (DSRC), and has served as Associate Chair and Chairman. In this capacity, he has led or co-led studies on a variety of topics from chemical and biological agent detection and decontamination, miniaturized biological instrumentation, jungle warfare technologies, and many others. In addition he has participated in numerous military field activities.

He also has extensive industry experience including co-founding and providing technical guidance for several companies, including Cepheid in Sunnyvale, CA, supplier of advanced instrumentation for clinical and research nucleic acid diagnostics.

In 2003, Dr. Kovacs served as the Investigation Scientist for the debris team of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, having worked for the first four months after the accident at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. In this role, he carried out physical, photographic, x-ray, chemical and other analyses on selected items from the nearly 90,000 pounds of recovered debris and worked toward understanding the nature of the accident. He also served as the Medical/Engineering Liaison for the Crew Survival Integration Investigation Team (SCSIIT), exploring crew module and medical forensics aspects of the accident.

He has considerable field experience in alpine, underwater and jungle environments. He was a member of a NASA team that climbed Licancabur volcano (19,734 ft.) on the Chile/Bolivia border and carried out dive experiments in the summit lake in November of 2003, serving as medical, physiologic research, and photography lead. In November 2004, he was medical, physiologic and safety lead for another expedition to Licancabur that included an altitude adaptation study, sonar mapping of the summit crater lake, and underwater photography, of which he carried out the video portion. Privately, he has climbed several of the west coast volcanoes, including Shasta, Adams, Rainier, and St. Helens.

Dr. Kovacs has logged several hundred microgravity parabolas aboard NASA’s KC-135 and C9B reduced gravity test aircraft. In this setting, he has served as Principal Investigator on a series of physiologic monitoring experiments in 2004 and as photographer for testing of a telerobotic surgical system in zero- and lunar-g in 2007.

Dr. Kovacs is a private pilot, scuba diver, and a Fellow National of the Explorers Club.