This afternoon, Regina Dugan, the new-ish director of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gave US President Barack Obama’s science advisory panel a briefing on what makes the mysterious funding agency unique and how she will guide its future.

Dugan is a mechanical engineer and technology investor who served as a DARPA program manager from 1996 to 2000 and took the helm of the 50-year old agency last year. At the third meeting of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST), she said that the agency has persisted as one of the “gems of the nation” responsible for such innovations as the global positioning system (GPS) and, more recently, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS).

The reason for its success, she said, is due not only to the stability of funding and urgency of purpose that comes with working on defense-related projects, but to its 120 program managers, who serve for just a few years at a time. “The influence of the program manager is large and the lever arm is long,” she said. “They [join] because it is their form of service to the country. Many believe they are answering a calling, myself included.”

That strategy, as PCAST co-chair Eric Lander noted, contrasts with other US funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. “NIH has smart people,” he said, “but they are not empowered to make bets. They defer to a study section.” Indeed, Dugan said that she has interacted with several funding agencies, including the Department of Energy and NASA, who “seek to emulate the DARPA model in some form.”

In leading DARPA, Dugan says she also hopes to re-engage the basic research community at universities, whose involvement has flagged, in part, due to national security restrictions on the inclusion of foreign nationals and exporting of sensitive data. “We’ve created an interface for researchers to check and make sure their work is [basic research] and free of restrictions,” she said. “We went on a university tour, so to speak, to get that message out.”