The Senate is expected to vote Monday on the nomination of former BP chief scientist Ellen Williams to head the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, which is the Energy Department’s venture capital arm for high-risk, potentially high-reward research.

Before Williams became chief scientist for BP in 2010, she spent years overseeing research at the University of Maryland, where she teamed up with fellow professor Michael Fuhrer to construct a device with unique adhesion characteristics capable of steering electrons along a sheet of super-thin carbon called graphene to create an array of electronic properties, as the university described:

The nano-transfer printing technology Williams and Fuhrer helped create allows novel and inexpensive ways of integrating nano-electronics into usable forms. Their prototypes can be stretched, bent, or twisted, and they are often transparent. Companies are investing in this technology to develop such applications as unobtrusive, portable pollution sensors and electronic devices woven into fabrics. Williams currently works on shrinking organic semi-conductor devices to the nano-scale, tailoring the properties of graphene for high-speed applications, and controlling adhesion among different nano-electronic materials.

Graphene has drawn attention for its unique properties that have applications in emerging technologies in super-capacitors, fuel cells and the potential to harvest hydrogen from the air.