APS Fellow Persis Drell heads DOE science advisory committee
Drell, a Stanford physicist, began in the new role in February.
Persis Drell, a particle physicist and former provost at Stanford and an APS Fellow, has been named chair of the Department of Energy’s newly established Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC). The appointment, announced by DOE in February, puts Drell at the head of a 21-member body charged with advising the Office of Science, the federal government’s largest funder of the physical sciences, with an annual budget of more than $8 billion.
For Drell, the role is both an honor and a duty. “If I'm asked to serve at that level for the national scientific enterprise, I'm going to say yes,” she says. “It's a responsibility as a senior member in the field, and an opportunity to do something helpful.”
SCAC was established by DOE’s Office of Science in September 2025, and its members were announced in February 2026. The committee replaces six discipline-specific advisory panels that had advised the Office of Science for decades, including the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, the oldest of the six, founded in 1967. Those six committees were disbanded in August 2025.
SCAC’s membership draws from academia, national laboratories, and industry, and its composition reflects a particular emphasis on artificial intelligence: Five of its 21 members are computer scientists. DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil, a computer scientist and former chair of the National Science Board, oversees the committee.
Unlike its predecessors, which each focused on a specific program area — like particle physics, nuclear science, and fusion energy — SCAC is charged with advising the Office of Science as a whole. “The previous committees tended to focus in their particular disciplinary area,” Drell says. “We are being asked to look across the Office of Science. You lose some granularity, but for something like a facilities roadmap, you need that wider lens.”
The committee has three active charges: advising on the Genesis Mission, DOE's initiative to integrate artificial intelligence into its scientific programs; a 10-year facilities roadmap; and quantum information science. Three subcommittees are currently at work on each charge, with reports expected at the full committee's July meeting. All SCAC meetings are open to the public, recorded, and include time for public comment; meeting information is available on the DOE Office of Science website.
Community members looking for ways to engage should watch for upcoming town halls. The quantum subcommittee had a town hall on June 12, and other subcommittees may host similar events in the coming months.
In the meantime, Drell noted, SCAC has been drawing heavily on the body of work produced by the previous committees. “We're using everything they've done,” she said. “The problem isn't today — we have lots of community input to the process we have right now.”
Drell acknowledges that the mechanisms for ongoing community engagement have yet to be worked out, and that charting a path forward on that front remains an open challenge for the committee. “The question of how that input flows going forward is a real concern, and one we're going to have to confront,” she says.
Drell comes to the role with a deep grounding in physics and its leading institutions. She earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Wellesley College in 1977 and a Ph.D. in atomic physics from The University of California, Berkeley, in 1983, before joining the Cornell physics faculty in 1988. In 2002, she moved to Stanford, where she has since served as director of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (2007-2012), dean of the Stanford School of Engineering (2014-2017), and provost of the university (2017-2023). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a fellow of the APS, elected in 1997.
Drell is aware that many in the U.S. science community face uncertainty and change, and she encourages her fellow physicists to speak up on behalf of the field.
“The best thing the community can do is continue to do spectacular science, communicate it, and advocate for its importance,” she says. “The more we talk about the positives, the better.”