President Obama appoints Google’s Eric Schmidt and Microsoft’s Craig Mundia as his technical advisors.
Eric Schmidt, 
Google’s CEO, and Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, have been named to President’s Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). According to a statement released by the White House, PCAST is an advisory group of the the country’s foremost scientists and engineers who will help the President and Vice President form policy related to science, technology, and innovation.
The council includes a who’s who in the science and technology fields, with leaders in climate change, medicine, physics, chemistry, and computer science all holding positions on the council. The group is co-chaired by John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Eric Lander, Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project; and Harold Varmus, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, former head of the National Institutes of Health and a Nobel laureate.
Members of the council include Christopher Chyba, an expert on the threats of biological warfare and nuclear proliferation; Chad Mirkin, a noted nanotech researcher; and David Shaw, founder of D.E. Shaw & Co. and a computational biochemistry expert. PCAST was originally established by President George H. W. Bush in 1990.