As President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris aim to form a “diverse cabinet”, media reports suggest that Arun Majumdar could be part of the administration’s cabinet.
Majumdar is the Jay Precourt Provostial Professor at Stanford University, a faculty member of the mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering departments, and co-chair of the Precourt Institute for Energy. He is also a professor in the photon science department at SLAC.
Early education and career
Majumdar completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, after earning a BA from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His scientific work is in the fields of thermoelectric materials, heat and mass transfer, thermal management, and waste heat recovery. Majumdar has also served as vice president of energy at Google, where he created several energy technology initiatives, especially at the intersection of data, computing and the power grid.
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Majumdar and Obama
But Majumdar is best known for his role as Under Secretary for Energy between November 30, 2011 and May 15, 2012, for which he was nominated by President Barack Obama. Prior to that, Majumdar was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate to become the Founding Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in 2009, where he served until June 2012.
Majumdar and Biden
In November 2020, Majumdar was appointed a volunteer member of the Joe Biden Presidential Transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the United States Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. . Following this, media reports said Majumdar could be part of Biden’s cabinet. If so, all Cabinet nominees require Senate approval and Majumdar could easily get approval, as he also enjoyed bipartisan support during the Obama administration.
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