Obama counts Mundie, Schmidt, hedge fund founder Shaw as tech advisors

President Obama named Microsoft research chief Craig Mundie and Google CEO Eric Schmidt to his panel of science and technology advisors along with a few other notable characters.

The full name of this panel is the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and the goal is "to strengthen our country’s capabilities in science and technology."

While Mundie and Schmidt are garnering the tech attention---it's unlikely there will be any Microsoft vs. Google spats at these wonk powwows---there are a few other notable names on Obama's list from key fields.

Among the other notable names in the technology space

• Chad Mirkin is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, and Medicine at Northwestern University. Speciality: Nanotechnology and its application in medicine.
• William Press is Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Specialty: Computer science, astrophysics, and international security. Also was the deputy lab director at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• David E. Shaw is the chief scientist of D. E. Shaw Research, LLC. He leads an interdisciplinary research group in the field of computational biochemistry and is the founder of hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co.