President Obama to Nominate Franklin Orr and Marc Kastner for DOE Leadership Posts

President Obama on November 14 announced his intent to nominate Franklin ("Lynn") Orr to be the Department of Energy's Under Secretary for Science and Marc Kastner to be Director of the Office of Science.

Dr. Orr is the Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University, a position he has held since 2009. Dr. Orr has been an associate professor and professor in the Department of Petroleum Engineering since 1985. From 2002 to 2008, Dr. Orr served as the Director of the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford. He was the Dean of the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford from 1994 to 2002 and the Chairman of the Department of Petroleum Engineering from 1991 to 1994. Dr. Orr held several other research positions from 1970 to 1985 in New Mexico, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Dr. Orr received a B.S. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Kastner is the Dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a position he has held since 2007. Previously, Dr. Kastner was the department head of the MIT Department of Physics from 1998 to 2007. From 1993 to 1998, he directed MIT's Center for Materials Science and Engineering, and from 1989 to1992 he was the Associate Director of MIT's Consortium for Superconducting Electronics. In 1989, Dr. Kastner was named Donner Professor of Science at MIT and from 1983 to 1987 he served as Head of the MIT Department of Physics Division of Atomic, Condensed Matter, and Plasma Physics. He joined the MIT Department of Physics in 1973 and was previously a research fellow at Harvard University. Dr. Kastner received an S.B., M.S., and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.