President Obama nominated Princeton physicist William Brinkman to head the Department’s Office of Science.  The Office of Science is the home for most of the non-weapons research conducted by the Department, and is one of the agencies targeted in the recent America COMPETES Act for a doubling of the research budget.  Dr. Brinkman is currently a Senior Research Physicist at Princeton, and has a long research career including research and managerial experience at Bell Labs and Sandia National Labs.  You can click here for a more complete biography.

This makes for a pretty complete team appointed at the Department of Energy.  Compare this to other parts of the federal science and technology portfolio, where we still wait for nominees for National Institutes of Health Director, head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and three of the four associate directors for the Office of Science and Technology Policy.  With these leadership vaccuums, it would not surprise me to see the Department of Energy to be the de facto lead science and technology agency in the government.  In an effort to sweeten these sour grapes, it’s worth noting that science and technology appointments are still, on the whole, a lot further along at 3 months into a new presidency.