Program Managers
IARPA Program Managers are experts in their fields of research who bring imagination and dedication to challenges facing the Intelligence Community (IC). The work of IARPA PMs directly and substantially impacts the IC's future capabilities and, more broadly, the field of science. This includes a broad spectrum of cutting-edge technology that ranges from machine learning and quantum computing to human cognition and linguistics.
Dr. Timothy McKinnon
Dr. Tim McKinnon joined IARPA in August of 2021. He currently manages the BETTER and HIATUS programs.
Before joining IARPA, Dr. McKinnon worked in private industry as Lead Data Scientist at Quantitative Scientific Solutions and Data Scientist at Perfecta. He also held academic appointments at the University of Maryland, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and University of Delaware. He was also a Fulbright scholar in 2010.
Dr. McKinnon’s professional interests include computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) with a focus on linguistic variation at dialect and idiolect levels. Throughout his career, Dr. McKinnon has published theoretical, descriptive and historic work on Malayic languages. Within NLP, his interests include information extraction, co-reference resolution, multilingual language models, adversarial machine learning, explainability, authorship attribution, and author privacy.
Raised in Flagstaff, AZ, Dr. McKinnon holds a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Delaware, where his dissertation “The Morphosyntax and Morphophonology or Kerinci Word-Shape Alternations” received the Wilbur Owen Sypherd Prize for best dissertation in the humanities. He received a Bachelor’ degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2004 with a dual major in linguistics and Polish language and literature.
Dr. Tim McKinnon joined IARPA in August of 2021. He currently manages the BETTER and HIATUS programs. Before joining IARPA, Dr. McKinnon worked in private industry as Lead Data Scientist at Quantitative Scientific Solutions and Data Scientist at Perfecta. He also held academic appointments at the University of Maryland, Max Planck Institute for Evo...