Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon highlights another embarrassing appointment from the Biden administration.
A professor of physics and gender studies who has argued that “white empiricism” undermines Einstein’s theory of general relativity now sits on a top physics advisory panel within the Department of Energy, raising questions from fellow scientists about the panel’s integrity and providing a potential target for the Trump administration as it seeks to stamp out DEI within the federal government.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire who has suggested that string theory “failed to succeed” because the field has too many white men, was appointed to the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) under the Biden administration in 2024. The panel advises the Energy Department on research and funding priorities for particle physics, giving it significant say over which projects receive federal support.
Prescod-Weinstein will remain on HEPAP until 2027 unless the Trump administration takes action to remove her. Her role at the Energy Department has rankled some scientists, who say that an institution tasked with directing federal research should not be advised by a woman who, in one 2020 paper, wrote that “Black feminist theory intersectionality should change physics.”
Prescod-Weinstein’s “scientific accomplishments seem modest and her racialist and sexist view of science, combined with her uniquely destructive activism, ought to be disqualifying,” said Sergiu Klainerman, a mathematician at Princeton University who studies the theory of general relativity. “It seems to me incredible that she has a voice on important decisions concerning the DOE physics division.”
Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, declined to comment on Prescod-Weinstein specifically but said it was important for HEPAP to remain apolitical. “It is essential for political leadership to appoint panel and board members for federal scientific enterprises who are fully committed to promoting excellence and selecting grants and personnel based on merit, and to remove those who are not,” Abbot told the Washington Free Beacon.
