John Holdren expected to be announced as science adviser

Physics Today : Who will be the next science adviser? And will that person have the same cabinet-rank clout as under the Clinton administration? These questions have been at the top of the list within the science community over the last few weeks since Barack Obama won the presidential election.

Obama has clearly indicated that energy and the environment will form a major part of his first term by appointing Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu to the Department of Energy and Carol Browner, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton, as a White House “czar” to try to balance the demands between the various stakeholders, industry, and the environmentalists. Now the final piece of the jigsaw, the role of science, will be put in place with the expected announcement on Saturday of John P. Holdren as science adviser.

“Holdren’s experience, depth of knowledge, and intellectual rigor make him uniquely qualified to lead the development and implementation of policies to address these issues,” says Fred Dylla, executive director of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today magazine.

Last year, in a speech about energy and the environment at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Holdren said, “After 35 years of reflection on this predicament I have concluded that the environment is at the heart of the energy problem, that energy is at the heart of the environmental problem, and the intersection of the environment, the economy, and energy is the most vexing problem in the sustainable prosperity picture for developing and industrial countries alike.”

When a wide-range of scientists were asked by the Obama campaign to recommend candidates for the position, Holdren’s name was frequently mentioned to the transition team. In early September there were five candidates who were being considered by the campaign say sources, before being whittled down to two by mid-November. Science magazine said today that Holdren had flown to Chicago earlier this morning to meet with the president-elect, who will describe the appointment in his weekly video address on Saturday.

Andrew C. Revkin reports at the New York Times that his information is that Obama met with Holdren about 10 days ago for about an hour. Holdren, like all previous candidates to cabinet appointments, declined to discuss the situation with Revkin when contacted by telephone.

Holdren, a physicist, worked as a consultant on re-entry vehicles in the 1960s at Lockheed Martin before receiving a PhD in plasma physics at Stanford University in 1970. For three years he worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. During the 1960s, Holdren became interested in the boundaries between science and government policies regarding nuclear weapons and became involved in Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs . Holdren’s involvement with Pugwash helped him develop an interest in energy issues, which, after moving to the University of California, Berkeley in 1973, led him to co-found and co-lead a campus-wide interdisciplinary graduate degree program in energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley. In the 1980s Holdren was extremely active on the Pugwash Council, the governing board of the organization, which is why he was invited to speak in Norway at the acceptance by Pugwash of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize .

In 1996 he moved to Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and eventually became the director of the Woods Hole Research Center . In recent years he has been president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and currently serves as its board chairman.

Holdren is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has authored some 300 articles and papers. He has co-authored and co-edited some 20 books and book-length reports, such as Energy (1971), Human Ecology(1973), Ecoscience (1977), Energy in Transition (1980), Earth and the Human Future (1986), Strategic Defences and the Future of the Arms Race (1987), Building Global Security Through Cooperation (1990), Conversion of Military R&D (1998), and Ending the Energy Stalemate (2004).

Says Dylla, “His solid research as a physicist speaks to his scientific credentials, but his extensive and highly-respected work on energy technology and policy, global environmental change, and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation attest to a remarkable man who believes that science and technology must play a crucial role in improving global economic and sociopolitical conditions in both developed and developing countries.”