Arun Majumdar is 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. Before joining Stanford, he was vice president for energy at Google, where he created several energy technology initiatives and advised the company on its broader energy strategy. He continues to be a consultant to Google on energy.

In October 2009 Dr. Majumdar was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate as founding director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), where he served till June 2012. From March 2011 to June 2012 he was also acting under secretary of energy and a senior advisor to the secretary of energy. He currently serves on the US Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board, the Council of the National Academy of Engineering and the Electric Power Research Institute, and the Science Board of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is a member of the International Advisory Panel for Energy of the Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry and the US delegation for the US-India Track II Dialogue on Climate Change and Energy.

Dr. Majumdar was previously the Almy and Agnes Maynard Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and associate laboratory director for energy and environment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research interests include the science and engineering of nanoscale materials and devices as well as large engineered systems.

Dr. Majumdar is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay in 1985 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989.