Washington ? President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Chicago schools executive Arne Duncan as his education secretary at an event in the city today, transition aides said, and is expected to tap Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., to serve as secretary of the interior later this week, all but finalizing his selections for major Cabinet posts.

Obama plans to introduce Duncan this morning at Dodge Renaissance Academy, a Chicago elementary school that the two visited together in 2005.

Monday afternoon, Obama formally rolled out the members of his climate change and energy team. Obama, vowing to address global warming and alternative energy sources, named Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu as his energy secretary, Lisa Jackson as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Nancy Sutley as chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality and Carol M. Browner as assistant to the president for energy and climate change, a new post.

At a press conference in Chicago, Obama said Chu “values science.” Before making the choice, the president-elect met with former Vice President Al Gore last week to discuss climate change, part of a return-to-science approach that Obama promised during the campaign.

Duncan, 44, has been chief executive of the Chicago public schools since 2001, steering the nation’s third-largest school district, which has more than 400,000 students. Duncan was raised in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, not far from Obama’s home, and is a longtime friend and basketball partner of the president-elect. He graduated from Harvard University, where he was co-captain of the basketball team, and he played professional basketball in Australia from 1987 to 1991. He returned to Chicago to direct the Ariel Education Initiative, which creates educational opportunities for inner-city youths on the South Side.

In 1998, Duncan joined the Chicago public school system, where he served as deputy chief of staff. Three years later, Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Duncan chief executive.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who visited a Chicago elementary school last week to highlight Duncan’s pay-for-performance program, showered praise on the executive in an interview with The Washington Post last week. Spellings called him “a really good school leader.”

“I do think he’s a reform-oriented school leader who has been a supporter of No Child Left Behind and accountability concepts and teacher quality,” she said. “He’s a kindred spirit.”

Dodge Renaissance Academy was a failing school on Chicago’s West Side that the city shuttered in 2002. Duncan reopened the school as an academy where candidates for advanced degrees in education work in the classrooms. Duncan and Obama visited the school three years ago and hailed it as a successful model for teacher residency programs that could be replicated in the toughest schools nationwide.