The White House announced Thursday that President Obama would nominate candidates for several key government posts, including surgeon general, assistant attorney general for civil rights and undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy.

Obama selected Dr. Vivek Hallegere Murthy, co-founder and president of Doctors for America and co-founder of VISIONS Worldwide, a nonprofit focused on HIV/AIDS in India and the United States, to be surgeon general. Murthy is also Instructor in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School.

Franklin Orr, director of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University, former director of the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford and chairman of the department of petroleum engineering, was tapped to be undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy.

Debo P. Adegbile, senior counsel at the Senate Judiciary Committee and longtime senior official at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is the pick to be the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice.

Marc Kastner, dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  former head of MIT’s physics department and before that head of the school’s Physics Division of Atomic, Condensed Matter and Plasma Physics, was selected to be director of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy.