That was quick. Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., after exiting the top perch at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the last weeks of 2021, is back in the upper echelons of U.S. scientific leadership as President Joe Biden’s science adviser.
Collins also assumes the role of co-chair of Biden’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. After leading the NIH under three different presidents—Biden, Donald Trump and Barack Obama—Collins is a familiar face in D.C. and among the scientific community.
Alongside Collins’ appointment, Biden promoted Alondra Nelson, Ph.D., to director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP. Nelson was previously deputy director for science and society at the OSTP. Nelson was also president of the Social Science Research Council from 2017 to 2021.
Nelson and Collins are filling a vacancy left by Eric Lander, who resigned from his post last week after a White House investigation found evidence that he violated workplace conduct rules by demeaning his staff. The scientific community has also called him out in the past for undervaluing the work of CRISPR gene editing Nobel laureates Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D., and Emmanuelle Charpentier, Ph.D.
The White House investigation had been kept under wraps until a Politico report revealed the findings.
In an editorial this week, the journal Nature wrote that the “White House should assess how it deals with wrongdoing and consider a deeper examination of its scientific advisory system.”
With Lander out, Collins will swiftly return just weeks after departing the director role of the NIH, where he still maintains a lab that he has run since 1993. His role in the White House will be on an interim basis, until permanent leadership is nominated and confirmed, the executive branch said Wednesday.
The duo will be critical to driving the science and technology work of the Biden administration, the White House said in its announcement. This includes gaining support for a new research agency, dubbed the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, helping launch the Cancer Moonshot 2.0, searching for Collins’ NIH replacement and other advisory work.