New UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has selected his brother Jo Johnson to serve as minister for the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy and the Department for Education, Nature News reports. It adds that it is not clear if Jo Johnson will take on the universities and science brief.
Jo Johnson previously held that universities and science role from 2015 through 2018, Nature News adds, where he oversaw the creation of the new funding body, UK Research and Innovation. In that role, he was largely liked by scientists, it says. "Jo Johnson has always been a very powerful supporter of UK universities, and, crucially, he is also a pro-European politician," the University of Oxford's Alastair Buchan tells Nature News.
Nature News notes that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has also chosen Dominic Cummings as a senior advisor. It adds that Cummings is a controversial figure and was a key force behind the Vote Leave campaign, but also that Cummings is a science supporter who has pushed at his blog for increased research funding, a British equivalent of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and for a data science unit in the PM's office.