As per media reports, In the next Biden-Harris Administration, two well-known India-Americans, Arun Majumdar and former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy are chosen.
According to the Washington Post and Politico, Mr Murthy, is one of the top Indian-American advisor to President-elect Joe Biden on COVID-19. He is a potential pick for the post of Secretary of Health and Human Services, while Stanford University Professor Arun Majumdar may get the post of Secretary of Energy.
Apart from them, a mention of other potential picks for various Cabinet-level positions in the Biden administration was made.
Currently, Mr Murthy, 43, is one of the co-chairs of the COVID-19 advisory board of the transition. He is closely associated to Mr Biden on coronavirus issues.
Further the reports said that even Mr Majumdar, is a top advisor to Mr Biden on energy related issues.
The other potential names for energy secretary are Ernest Moniz, former secretary of energy; Dan Reicher, Stanford University scholar and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, former deputy secretary of energy.
Reports stated that Mr Murthy was one of the public health experts who frequently educated Biden about the pandemic during the campaign.
Mr.Murthy was nominated by President Barack Obama. At the end of 2014, he became the 19th US Surgeon General.
He considered gun violence to be a public health threat and because of this his nomination in the Senate was on hold a year back.
During his mandate, he had issued a landmark report on drug and alcohol addiction, calling it “a moral test for America” and submitted it among reports his predecessors had given to draw attention to other major public health threats, such as tobacco use, AIDS, the need for physical activity.
He was even the vice admiral in the US Public Health Service’s commissioned corps and is trained in internal medicine.
Mr Majumdar is the Jay Precourt Provostial Chair Professor at Stanford University, a faculty member of the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering (by courtesy) and co-Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, that is related to researching and co-ordinating different education activities across seven Schools and the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
He is even a faculty in Department of Photon Science at SLAC.
In October 2009, Mr Majumdar was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate to become the Founding Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), where he served till June 2012 and helped ARPA-E become a model of excellence and innovation for the government with bipartisan support from Congress and other stakeholders.
Further, Mr Majumdar was the Vice President for Energy at Google, after he left Washington, DC and before joining Stanford.
In Google, many technology initiatives were created by him on intersection of data, computing and electricity grid.
