Arun Majumdar

Arun Majumdar is a materials scientist, engineer, and University of California, Berkeley graduate who was nominated for the position of Under Secretary of Energy between November 30, 2011 and May 15, 2012 but then the nomination was retracted. He was previously the Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he was also deputy director of LBNL as well as professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He was nominated to be the first director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and appointed to that position in September 2009.
In 2012, he joined Google to drive Google.org's energy initiatives and advise the company on their broader energy strategy. He is now the Jay Precourt Professor at Stanford University, where he serves on the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and is a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy.
His scientific work is in the fields of thermoelectric materials, heat and mass transfer, thermal management, and waste heat recovery. He has published several hundred papers, patents, and conference proceedings, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He served as one of the Science Envoys of the US in 2014.