There’s a glaring hole in the president’s new science and technology council
By And Garisto & Nature magazine
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg (left) has been named to President Trump’s science and technology advisory board.
Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty
US President Donald Trump has named 13 people to his group of science advisers – and all but one are top technology executives. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) now includes just one academic researcher and at least nine billionaires.
New members include Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, Facebook’s parent company; Larry Ellison, executive chairman of software giant Oracle; and Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. There are also CEOs of tech hardware companies: Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Lisa Su of Advanced Microdevices, and Michael Dell of Dell Technologies. Business leaders have a combined wealth of more than $900 billion.
Three of the managing directors hold doctorates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Su’s degree is in electrical engineering. Jacob DeWitte and Bob Mumgaard, who both run nuclear energy start-ups, have degrees in nuclear engineering and applied plasma physics, respectively.
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The only academic researcher is John Martinis, a quantum physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for the observation of macroscopic quantum phenomena. “I am honored to be part of the committee,” Martinis said. Nature.
Laura Greene, a physicist at Florida State University in Tallahassee and a member of PCAST during President Joseph Biden’s administration, praised Martinis and Su as “outstanding, both in science and technology.”
But others criticize the composition of the committee. “Not a single biologist and academic researcher on PCAST,” Vaughan Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, said in a statement. an article on Bluesky. “This leaves the country incredibly unprepared for the age of biotechnology, a race we are already starting to lose.” »
The balance could still change: according to the terms of a executive order issued by Trump in 2025he could appoint as many as 11 additional members to the committee, says Kenny Evans of Rice University in Houston, Texas, a science policy expert and co-founder of the White House Science Archive.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gather the board
PCAST makes science policy recommendations to the White House on topics such as improve nutrition science And strengthen the scientific workforce. It also reviews interinstitutional programs already underway, such as the Network and Information Technology Research and Development Initiative. Most of PCAST’s work is done by subcommittees, and its reports are largely prepared by staff at the Science and Technology Policy Institute, a federally funded research and development center in Washington, DC.
During Trump’s first term, from 2017 to 2021, PCAST had 13 members, not including the chair: 7 university scientists and 6 people from industry. Under Biden, whose term ran from 2021 to 2024, it had 28 members (not including chairs), 19 of whom were academic researchers, with the remaining 9 from industry and government. Aside from the Trump-appointed PCASTs, every PCAST since 2001 has had at least 10 members who were academic researchers.
The backgrounds of the new PCAST members are no surprise, Evans says. “Historically, PCAST’s membership reflects the president’s science and technology priorities,” he says. “This group is what we would expect from the Trump administration: a handful of billionaires and tech executives whose expertise is narrowly focused on AI, quantum and nuclear fusion. »
Artificial intelligence and quantum information are the first and second entries on the Trump administration’s list of research and development priorities. Trump administration aims to quadruple U.S. commercial sales nuclear energy by 2050, and a merger was announced in December between nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies and a company co-owned by Trump.
The committee will be co-chaired by Trump’s AI czar, venture capitalist David Sacks, and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios. On the social media platform
This article is reproduced with permission and has been published for the first time on March 26, 2026.
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