Rumors have been flying thick and fast about who might serve on president-elect Barack Obama’s team, and today they seem to be coalescing around some semi-probable future announcements.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Steve Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, will be named secretary of energy. Chu shared the 1997 Nobel prize in physics for his work done at Bell Labs on cooling and trapping atoms. In recent years he has led a number of energy-related initiatives at the lab, including the solar energy initiative Helios. He’s also brought together a number of groups to form new organizations like the Energy Biosciences Institute, a research partnership whose links with BP had some academics uneasy at the start (see earlier Nature story, subscription required).

Other possible appointments include Carol Browner, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Bill Clinton, in the new position of what’s being styled as an “energy/climate czar”. This job would likely coordinate among the many agencies that all have a piece of energy policy in the bureaucratic jungle that is the US government. One key question that remains unclear: what sort of power this position would have in terms of directing the other agencies’ efforts.

Lisa Jackson, former head of the New Jersey environmental protection agency, will head the full federal EPA.

Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor of Los Angeles who has served on various California environmental-related positions, is likely to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The current occupant of that position, Jim Connaughton, is in Poznan, Poland, for the international climate negotiation talks that Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson is covering here.

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