President Barack Obama, J.D. '91, has announced his intention to appoint physicist Cherry A. Murray, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, to the seven-member National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.
The text of the White House news release is here.
Background on Murray from Harvard Magazine appears here; her SEAS biography and research profile are here.
The commission is co-chaired by a pair of Harvard Law School alumni: former Florida governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham, LL.B. '62, and William K. Reilly, J.D. '65, who was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush; in that capacity, Reilly oversaw the federal response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989.