Arun Majumdar is the Jay Precourt Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Energy Science and Engineering and a senior fellow and the former director of the Precourt Institute for Energy. He is also a faculty member in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (by courtesy) and in the Department of Photon Science at SLAC. He served in the Obama administration as the founding director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and as the acting under secretary of energy. He served as a science envoy for the US Department of State and currently serves as the chair of the US Secretary of Energy Advisory Board. Dr. Majumdar was also vice president for energy at Google and advises numerous businesses in the energy innovation ecosystem. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.