Arunava Majumdar is a materials scientist, engineer, and the inaugural dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Stanford University. He was nominated for the position of Under Secretary of Energy in the USA between 30 November 2011, and 15 May 2012. Previously, he was the Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), University of California, Berkeley, where he also served as Deputy Director of LBNL and as Professor of Mechanical Engineering. He was appointed as the first director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in September 2009, and was one of the science envoys of the US in 2014. Earlier, he has served as Vice President for Energy at Google, and as the Jay Precourt Professor at Stanford University. He was also a member of the engineering and computer science jury for the Infosys Prize from 2012 to 2016.

He received his PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. His scientific work focuses on thermoelectric materials, heat and mass transfer, thermal management, and waste heat recovery. He has published several hundred papers, patents, and conference proceedings.