Arun Majumdar
Stanford University
Jay Precourt Provostial Chair Professor
Dr. Arun Majumdar is the Jay Precourt Provostial Chair Professor at Stanford University, a faculty member of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. From 2015 - 2020, he was co-director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, which integrates and coordinates research and education activities on science, technology, finance and policy across all seven Schools and the Hoover Institution at Stanford. In 2009, Majumdar was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate to become the Founding Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), where he served until 2012 and helped ARPA-E become a model of excellence and innovation for the government with bipartisan support from Congress and other stakeholders. Between 2011 and 2012, he also served as the Acting Under Secretary of Energy, enabling the portfolio that reported to him: Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Office of Electricity Delivery and Reliability, Office of Nuclear Energy and the Office of Fossil Energy, as well as multiple cross-cutting efforts such as Sunshot and Grid Tech Team. After leaving Washington, DC, Majumdar was the Vice President for Energy at Google, where he assembled a team to create technologies and businesses at the intersection of data, computing and electricity grid. Majumdar is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his BS in Mechanical Engineering in 1985 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989.