Obama nominates astrophysicist France Córdova as next NSF director

Science : President Obama has nominated France Córdova to replace Subra Suresh as director of the National Science Foundation. Suresh was midway through his six-year term when he left the agency earlier this year to become president of Carnegie Mellon University. Córdova earned her PhD in astrophysics from Caltech in 1979. She finished a five-year term as president of Purdue University in 2012, and before that had been chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, and held positions at UC Santa Barbara, NASA, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The nomination has to be approved by Congress, but despite delays for other presidential nominations, Córdova’s confirmation is not expected to meet much resistance. If she is approved, she will be NSF’s 14th director and the 2nd woman to hold the position.