"The PCAST roster contains few academics and women"
"U.S. President Donald Trump today unveiled a set of scientific advisers heavily skewed toward artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, topics his administration has emphasized. The roster, unlike previous iterations of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), features some of the world’s wealthiest people and several of Trump’s biggest political supporters from high-tech industry—but only one academic scientist.
Today’s announcement named the first 13 members of what could ultimately be a 24-member body. They include multibillionaires Larry Ellison of Oracle, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Lisa Su of AMD, Sergey Brin of Google, and Michael Dell of Dell. John Martinis of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for work fundamental to quantum computing, is the only current academic. And Su and Safra Catz, former Oracle CEO and financier, are the only women in the group.
In contrast, two-thirds of the 30 PCAST members under former President Joe Biden were members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and 14 were women, including co-chairs Frances Arnold and Maria Zuber."
