03/08/2021 at 10:00AM
The purpose of the hearing is to consider the nominations of:
- Dr. Geraldine Richmond to be Under Secretary for Science, Department of Energy
- Cynthia Weiner Stachelberg to be an Assistant Secretary of the Interior (Policy, Management, and Budget)
- Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe to be Director of the Office of Science, Department of Energy
Dr. Geri Richmond is a renowned water chemist who has written:
Environmental concerns about adequate clean water resources have increasingly become more global with the recognition that unwanted chemicals in the atmosphere, in our soils and in our surface waters often transport well beyond the national boundaries of origin. As a result, there is a growing international urgency to understand environmental issues that can cross boundaries with climate change, healthy air quality and clean water resources being the most obvious. The focus of the studies in the Richmond Laboratory is to provide fundamental insights into molecular processes that underlie some of the aforementioned global concerns, with a particular focus on understanding environmentally important processes that occur at water surfaces and aqueous-oil boundary layers.
Winnie Stachelberg is a long-time executive at the Center for American Progress. Previously she was the political director for the Human Rights Campaign.
Dr. Asmeret Berhe is a soil biogeochemist who studies climate change. She was born and did undergraduate education in Eritrea before receiving a master’s degree in political ecology from Michigan State and her PhD from UC Berkeley. She is a professor and assistant dean at UC Merced.
The main goal of her research is to understand the effect of changing environmental conditions on vital soil processes, most importantly the cycling and fate of essential elements in the critical zone. She studies soil processes in systems experiencing natural and/or anthropogenic perturbation in order to understand fundamental principles governed by geomorphology, and contemporary modifications introduced by changes in land use and climate.