steven chu

On the day that Steven Chu was undergoing his confirmation hearing for the Secretary of the Dept. of Energy position, his research paper was posted on ArXiv by one of his co-author.

Still, I wonder how much of this can he still do after he becomes the head of DOE. Will he have time to continue doing or be involved in research work, even on the peripheral? Can it also be a conflict of interest?

I doubt he'll have much time to do things like this on a regular basis once he starts spending more time heading up the DOE.

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be the next energy secretary, and he has picked veteran regulators from diverse backgrounds to fill three other key jobs on his environmental and climate-change team, Democratic sources said yesterday.

Obama plans to name Carol M. Browner, Environmental Protection Agency administrator for eight years under President Bill Clinton, to fill a new White House post overseeing energy, environmental and climate policies, the sources said. Browner, a member of Obama's transition team, is a principal at the Albright Group.

Obama has also settled on Lisa P. Jackson, recently appointed chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine (D) and former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, to head the EPA. Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor of Los Angeles for energy and environment, will chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality.