Steven Chu
Steven Chu is an American physicist and former government official. He is a Nobel laureate and was the 12th U.S. secretary of energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.
Chu served as U.S. Secretary of Energy under the administration of President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. At the time of his appointment as Energy Secretary, Chu was a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where his research was concerned primarily with the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. Chu resigned as energy secretary on April 22, 2013. He returned to Stanford as Professor of Physics, Molecular & Cellular Physiology, and Energy Science and Engineering.
Chu is a vocal advocate for more research into renewable energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combating climate change. He has conceived of a global "glucose economy", a form of a low-carbon economy, in which glucose from tropical plants is shipped around like oil is today. Chu served a one-year term as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science starting from February 22, 2019.
Early life and education
Chu was born on February 28, 1948, in St. Louis, Missouri, with Chinese ancestry from Liuhe, Taicang, China. He attended Garden City High School in Garden City, New York. He received both a B.A. in mathematics and a B.S. in physics in 1970 from the University of Rochester and earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, under Eugene D. Commins, in 1976, during which he was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.Chu comes from a family of highly educated white collar professionals and scholars. His father, Ju-Chin Chu, earned a doctorate in chemical engineering from MIT and taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and his mother studied economics at MIT. His maternal grandfather, Shu-tian Li, was a hydraulic engineer who earned a Ph.D. from Cornell University, and was a professor and president of Tianjin University. His mother's uncle, Li Shu-hua, a biophysicist, attended the University of Paris before returning to China.
Chu's older brother, Gilbert Chu, is a professor of biochemistry and medicine at Stanford University. His younger brother, Morgan Chu, is a patent lawyer who is the former co-managing partner at the law firm Irell & Manella. According to Chu, his two brothers and four cousins have four PhDs, three MDs, and a JD among themselves.
Career and research
After obtaining his doctorate, he remained at Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher for two years before joining Bell Labs, where he and his several co-workers carried out his Nobel Prize-winning laser cooling work. He left Bell Labs and became a professor of physics at Stanford University in 1987, serving as the chair of its physics department from 1990 to 1993 and from 1999 to 2001. At Stanford, Chu and three others initiated the Bio-X program, which focuses on interdisciplinary research in biology and medicine, and played a key role in securing the funding for the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. In August 2004, Chu was appointed as the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratory, and joined UC Berkeley's department of physics and department of molecular and cell biology. Under Chu's leadership, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was a center of research into biofuels and solar energy. He spearheaded the laboratory's Helios project, an initiative to develop methods of harnessing solar power as a source of renewable energy for transportation.Chu's early research focused on atomic physics by developing laser cooling techniques and the magneto-optical trapping of atoms using lasers. He and his co-workers at Bell Labs developed a way to cool atoms by employing six laser beams opposed in pairs and arranged in three directions at right angles to each other. Trapping atoms with this method allows scientists to study individual atoms with great accuracy. Additionally, the technique can be used to construct an atomic clock with great precision.
At Stanford, Chu's research interests expanded into biological physics and polymer physics at the single-molecule level. He studied enzyme activity and protein and RNA folding using techniques like fluorescence resonance energy transfer, atomic force microscopy, and optical tweezers. His polymer physics research used individual DNA molecules to study polymer dynamics and their phase transitions. He continued researching atomic physics as well and developed new methods of laser cooling and trapping., he is the President of the Scientific Committee of ESPCI Paris.
Honors and awards
Steven Chu was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for the "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light", together with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Academia Sinica of Taiwan, and is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Korean Academy of Science and Engineering. In 1994, The Optical Society recognized Chu with the William F. Meggers Award. The Society later elected him an Honorary Member. He was also awarded the Humboldt Prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1995. In 1998, Chu received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Chu received an honorary doctorate from Boston University when he was the keynote speaker at the 2007 commencement exercises. He is a senior fellow of the Design Futures Council. Diablo Magazine awarded him an Eco Award in its April 2009 issue, shortly after he was nominated for Energy Secretary.
Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University awarded him honorary doctorates during their 2010 and 2009 commencement exercises, respectively. He was awarded an honorary degree from Yale University during its 2010 commencement. He was also awarded an honorary degree from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, the same institution at which his father taught for several years, during its 2011 commencement. Penn State University awarded him an honorary doctorate during their 2012 commencement exercises. In 2014, Chu was awarded an honorary doctorate from Williams College, during which he gave a talk moderated by Williams College Professor Protik Majumder. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College during its 2015 commencement. Chu was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Amherst College in 2017, where he later gave a lecture titled "Climate Change and Needed Technical Solutions for a Sustainable Future" in March 2018.
Chu was elected an international fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering UK in 2011, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2014. His nomination reads:
Steven Chu was named the winner of the 2024 American Institute of Physics Karl Compton Medal, named after prominent physicist Karl Taylor Compton. The medal is now presented by AIP every two years to highly distinguished physicists who have made outstanding contributions to physics through exceptional statesmanship in science.
U.S. Secretary of Energy
Chu's nomination to be Secretary of Energy was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate on January 20, 2009. On January 21, 2009, Chu was sworn in as Secretary of Energy in the Barack Obama administration. Chu is the first person appointed to the U.S. Cabinet after having won a Nobel Prize. He is also the second Chinese American to be a member of the U.S. Cabinet, after former Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke.In February 2009, Chu visited China where he and China's Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang announced the US-China Clean Energy Research Center.
Chu's scientific work continued, however, and he even published a paper on gravitational redshift in Nature in February 2010 and another one he co-authored in July 2010.
In March 2011, Chu said that regulators at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission should not delay approving construction licenses for planned U.S. nuclear power plants in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.
In August 2011, Chu praised an advisory panel report on curbing the environmental risks of natural gas development. Chu responded to the panel's report on hydraulic fracturing, the controversial drilling method that is enabling a U.S. gas boom while bringing fears of groundwater contamination. The report called for better data collection of air and water data, as well as "rigorous" air pollution standards and mandatory disclosure of the chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process. Chu said that he would "be working closely with my colleagues in the Administration to review the recommendations and to chart a path for continued development of this vital energy resource in a safe manner".
Chu faced controversy for a statement he made prior to being appointed, claiming in a September 2008 interview with the Wall Street Journal that "somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." However, in March 2012, he retracted this comment, saying "..since I walked in the door as Secretary of Energy I've been doing everything in my powers to do what we can to... reduce those prices" and that he "no longer shares the view ".
On February 12, 2013, Chu was the designated survivor during the State of the Union address.
On February 1, 2013, Chu announced his intent to resign. In his resignation announcement, he warned of the risks of climate change from continued reliance on fossil fuels, and wrote, "the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones; we transitioned to better solutions". He resigned on April 22, 2013.