President Barack Obama has nominated National Highway Traffic Safety Administration deputy head Blair Anderson to serve as policy undersecretary for the Transportation Department, the NHTSA’s parent Cabinet organization.

Anderson served as the deputy assistant secretary for DOT’s finance and budget office for the two years prior to his NHTSA transition in 2015 and has also held the roles of chief financial officer and assistant secretary for budget and finance at the department, the White House said Tuesday.

He was also senior adviser to Rep. John Olver from 2009 to 2013 and served as the lawmaker’s legislative director between 2007 and 2009.

Anderson supported efforts by the House Appropriations transportation subcommittee to give $10.5 billion in funds for the High Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail grant program and the panel also helped create the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant program.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton University.

NASA has validated 1,284 new planets from Kepler space telescope’s July 2015 catalog to post a new record as the single largest batch of confirmed planets to date.

The space agency said Wednesday the new additions were verified among 4,302 planet candidates after meeting the required probability of more than 99 percent to become planets.

Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said the Kepler findings build on the possibility that there are more planets than stars and will support future missions that aim to discover life in another planet.

Researchers used a statistical analysis method devised by Timothy Morton, associate research scholar at Princeton University, to assess multiple candidates simultaneously, NASA noted.

Approximately 550 planets from the batch are similar in size to Earth and nine of these are likely to have liquid water since they orbit their stars’ habitable zone.

The agency further noted there are now more than 3,200 verified planets among which 2,325 were found through Kepler.

The space telescope works to discover planet candidates by monitoring decreases in brightness when planets transit in front of their stars, NASA said.

Kepler has operated since March 2009 as the first NASA mission to seek potentially habitable planets.

The White House on Tuesday hosted a conference to discuss new initiatives in the public and private sectors to integrate resilience concepts into commercial and residential building design, standards and codes.

Those efforts are aimed to help communities build safer and resilient houses, workplaces and schools as well as to manage the potential impacts of climate change on facilities, the White House said Tuesday.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to review the agency’s building construction requirements in a move to align program requirements with current resilience model building codes and standards.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will collaborate with the National Institute of Building Sciences to examine the cost-effectiveness of hazard mitigation systems.

FEMA also looks to incentivize organizations that adopt and enforce building codes at the state and local levels through its Public Assistance Program.

The General Services Administration aims to establish a decision-making framework to for customer agencies to identify and address climate-related risks across their supply chains.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is developing tornado hazard maps and a performance-based standard meant to help architects design buildings that can withstand debris and high winds.

The Army Corps of Engineers debuted a website that offers multiple resources for resilient building codes, while the Environmental Protection Agency plans to release its “Smart Growth Code Fixes for Climate Adaptation” report soon.