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 California, Davis. Confirmation hearings for the influential policy-making post will be held by the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation under chairman Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.).

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...

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