President Barack Obama has nominated a physicist and director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to serve as his next energy secretary.
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Ernest J. Moniz would replace Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, as secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy. Chu announced Feb. 1 that he would not serve a second four-year term in the Obama administration.
Obama described Moniz, director of MIT’s Energy Initiative, as “another brilliant scientist,” according to The New York Times and Washington Post.
His cabinet nomination was one of three announced Monday. Obama also nominated Environmental Protection Agency official Gina McCarthy as EPA administrator, and Wal-Mart executive Sylvia Mathews Burwell as White House budget director.
The Post reported that Obama hailed the nominees’ predecessors and said “he was confident that their successors would pursue his administration’s goals of achieving energy independence, creating more clean-energy jobs, fighting climate change, and reigniting economic growth.”
Moniz served in the administration of former President Bill Clinton.
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