Stanford University in 1987. Chu served as the chair of the Physics Department at Stanford University from 1990 to 1993 and from 1999 to 2001. He was appointed as the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2004, during which time he also accepted a position as a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Chu, with three other professors, was involved with the Bio-X program in Stanford that is intended to bring together scientists from physics, chemistry, biology and engineering backgrounds under one roof in the James H. Clark Center. He also played an important role in securing the funding of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford.

In December 2008, Chu was reportedly selected by President-elect Barack Obama to be nominated for the position of Secretary of Energy in his cabinet. If nominated and confirmed, Chu will be the first Chinese American to hold this office.

Research

Steven Chu’s early research focused on atomic physics by developing laser cooling techniques and trap atoms using lasers. He expanded his research area to polymer physics and biophysics while he was at Stanford. His current research focuses on the study of biological molecules and systems at single molecular level. Many Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows from his group have become professors at research universities around the world.

Since 2004, Chu has been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has 4,000 employees and a budget of $650 million. The laboratory under Chu has been a center of research into biofuels and solar energy technologies. Chu has been a vocal advocate for more research into alternative energy, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combat global warming.

Honors and awards

Steven Chu is a co-winner of Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”, shared with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Academia Sinica of Taiwan. He is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Korean Academy of Sciences and Technology as well as a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council.

Alleged improper compensation

Steven Chu was one of 46 employees named in a 2006 PricewatershouseCoopers audit of improper compensation practices at the University of California. Records produced under the California Public Relations Act also show that he was one of at least 29 employees offered unusual perks in hiring letters, perks which the university had not made public.

Personal life

Chu married his wife Jean, an Oxford-trained physicist, in 1997. He comes from a family of accomplished scholars. His maternal grandfather earned advanced civil engineering degrees at Cornell and his uncle studied physics at the Sorbonne before they returned to China. His father earned an advanced chemical engineering degree at M.I.T. and taught at Washington University and Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, while his mother studied economics. His younger brother, Morgan Chu, is a partner and the former Co-Managing Partner at Irell & Manella LLP, a law firm. His older brother Gilbert Chu is a professor and researcher of Biochemistry and Medicine at Stanford University. His two brothers and four cousins earned three M.D.s, four Ph.D.s, and a J.D. among them.

Chu was the keynote speaker for Boston University’s commencement ceremony on May 20, 2007. Chu is an early signatory to Project Steve, an educational campaign supporting the conventional scientific understanding of evolution.

Besides his scientific career, he has also developed serious interest in various sports, including baseball, swimming and cycling. He taught himself tennis by reading a book in the eighth grade, and was a second-string substitute for the school team for three years. He also taught himself how to pole vault using bamboo poles obtained from the local carpet store. A second-generation Chinese American, Chu has stated to journalists that he never learned to speak Chinese because his parents always talked to him and his siblings in English.

Source:wikipedia.org