ScienceInsider

by Eli Kintisch

Last week, the White House nominated Arun Majumdar to lead ARPA-E, the risk-taking blue-sky energy research shop at the Department of Energy. Majumdar is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a materials scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At the new agency, Majumdar will face a myriad of challenges: shaping the organization's priorities in a time when thousands of scientists are delving into energy research areas and clamoring for money, defining its balance between applied and basic research, and deciding just how "blue-sky" he wants DOE to be going with the new concept.

"He's a good manager—running two labs and always having time for the students," says former student Marta Cerruti, a chemist. Cerruti says Majumdar's wide knowledge "in many fields" will help him with ARPA-E's wide goals. He's shown the ability to balance short- and long-term goals in lab research, for example during a project to design a multiuse portable sensor. "He was always pushing us to look for long-term goals—namely, that it could work in moist environments, but at the same time, keeping the short-term objective," Cerruti says. That goal was to make a sensor that could work in dry ones, a much easier task.

Assuming the Senate confirms him, Majumdar will come to Washington with the best connections he could ask for: Current Energy Secretary Steve Chu was his former boss at LBNL.