President George W Bush has nominated physicist John H Marburger III as director of the US office of science and technology. Senators will now decide whether to approve the long-awaited recommendation. The high-profile advisory role for Marburger - who is currently director of Brookhaven National Laboratory - follows recent budget freezes imposed by Bush's administration in many areas of physics research.
Marburger was president and professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook between 1980 and 1994, and served as professor of physics and electrical engineering until 1997. He received his BA in physics from Princeton University in 1962, and gained his PhD at Stanford University in 1967 for research into nonlinear optics. He has also worked for a number of professional and philanthropic organizations, and made a series of educational television programmes.
Under Marburger’s directorship, Brookhaven National Laboratory obtained the first results from its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, while the laboratory’s g-2 experiment – designed to measure the spin of muons – recently cast doubt on the Standard Model of particle physics.
