People: Clinton Names MIT Physicist To Influential OSTP Position

Later this month, the Senate is expected to confirm President Bill Clinton's June nomination of Ernest J. Moniz to be associate director for science of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), under director and presidential science adviser John H. Gibbons. Currently head of the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Moniz, 50, will replace nutrition biologist M.R.C. Greenwood, who resigned in May for personal reasons and has returned to the University of Ca

Written byFranklin Hoke

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Working with Gibbons and Greenwood, Moniz was one of the principal framers of the administration's 1994 science policy report, "Science in the National Interest." The report was positively received by scientists as an expression of the administration's support for research and education, but was faulted for a lack of specifics concerning funding and the balance between basic and applied research (B. Reppert, The Scientist, Aug. 22, 1994, page 1).

Ernest Moniz LONG-TERM PLANNER: At OSTP, MIT's physics department head Ernest J. Moniz hopes to work with Congress to develop a science program that looks beyond current budget-cutting.

According to Moniz, the report was a solid endorsement by the administration for "investing" in basic science. Despite the prevailing budget-cutting orientation in Congress, Moniz sees a receptivity to this outlook on Capitol Hill.

"Through all the haze of contentious issues, the Congress has expressed a strong support for basic science research," Moniz notes. "There's ...

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