US President Barack Obama announced earlier this week his picks to fill the deputy director spot at the National Science Foundation and the post leading the Department of Energy's Office of Science, ScienceInsider reports.
For the second-in-command position at NSF, Obama nominated Richard Buckius, an engineer who has served as NSF's chief operating officer since last fall. He's also been the assistant director of the engineering directorate at NSF and both a professor of mechanical engineering and vice president for researcher at Purdue University.
Meanwhile, for the DOE Office of Science post, Obama nominated Harvard University's Cherry Murray. She served as dean of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences between 2009 and 2014, and before that was a science administrator at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Murray also received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2014.
Her nomination, ScienceInsider notes, comes after the Senate failed to act on Obama's previous, 2013 pick for the position, MIT's Marc Kastner. Kastner is now the president of a new research philanthropy, Science Philanthropy Alliance, it adds.