US President Joe Biden on Wednesday nominated Indian-American Radha Iyengar to a top position in the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense. At present, Radha Iyengar is the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. She has been nominated as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, Department of Defense.
Before her appointment, Iyengar was the Research and Insights for Trust and Safety Director at Google. There, she led cross-functional teams on business analytics, data science, and technical research. Iyengar previously served as the Global Head of Policy Analysis at Facebook, where she focused on high-risk/high-harm safety and critical international security issues.
Before this, Iyengar was a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, where she focused on improving the measurement and evaluation of readiness and security efforts across the Department of Defense. She also held several senior staff positions on national security issues at the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and the White House National Security Council.
Iyengar started at the London School of Economics, where she was an Assistant Professor. She did her postdoctoral work at Harvard and received her PhD and MS in Economics from Princeton University. She holds a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
