According to Politico.com, President Obama will nominate current REI President and CEO Sally Jewell to lead the Interior Department. Sally is also a current member of the UW Board of Regents.
If confirmed, Sally would replace current Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who held the post throughout Obama’s first term. Salazar announced last month that he would step down in March.
Congratulations Sally!
NIH Director Francis Collins calls the potential cuts from sequestration a “profound and devastating blow” for medical research. If Congress cannot find a way to achieve debt reduction without massive federal spending cuts, NIH will lose 6.4 percent of its budget this year. This could hurt the availability of research grants. Currently, 80 percent of NIH funding goes to university and medical school researchers but the odds of award have been declining in recent years. According to Collins, only one in six of those that apply receive grants; the chances used to be one in three. And all of this could get much worse if sequestration is implemented.
Read more at Politico.com.
NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco announced today that she will step down in February, ending a four-year tenure that saw the longtime academic juggle a slate of controversial issues, from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill to the skyrocketing cost of weather satellites. In an email to employees yesterday, Lubchenco wrote that she was leaving NOAA to return to her family and academic career in Oregon.
On December 3rd, NIH Director Francis Collins announced the selection of Richard Nakamura, Ph.D., as the new director of the NIH’s Center for Scientific Review (CSR). Dr. Nakamura has been serving as the acting director of CSR since September 2011 and has previously been both the scientific director and the deputy director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
Find more information in the NIH press release at: http://www.nih.gov/news/health/dec2012/od-03.htm.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) has updated its states website to link to EERE resources for each state. The new site is called Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in My State and links to state-specific content published by EERE.
The site also publishes graphs of DOE energy statistics reflecting the status of energy efficiency and renewable energy in each state. These graphs allow you to compare and rank states according to per capita and economic indicators, and you can download the graphs for reports or presentations. You can find graphs showing electricity production from renewable energy resources for every state. And you can find links to state renewable energy resource maps.
Finally, the site lists also publishes state news relating to renewable energy and energy efficiency activities sponsored by EERE technical programs or facilitated by the state or local governments. You can search for news by state and set up a news feed (via RSS) for each state.