Editor's Note: This is another installment in the Rapier's daily profiles of one of Barack Obama's nominees to a cabinet or high-level administration post.Secretary of Energy:
Born February 28, 1948. Chu is an American experimental physicist. He is known for his research in laser cooling and trapping of atoms, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997.
Chu, a Chinese American, was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1970 from the University of Rochester, and his doctorate degree from University of California, Berkeley in 1976. He then joined Bell Labs where he and his several co-workers carried out his Nobel Prize-winning laser cooling work. He then left Bell Labs and became a professor of physics at Stanford University in 1987. 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 has been a vocal advocate for more research into alternative energy and nuclear power, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combat global warming. He has pushed scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and in industry to develop technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He has joined the Copenhagen Climate Council, an international collaboration between business and science, established to create momentum for the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Chu was instrumental in founding the Energy Biosciences Institute, which brings together biologists, chemists, physicists, and engineers to work together on energy-related molecular research in a rare collaboration between UC Berkeley, the oil major BP, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the University of Illinois. This has drawn controversy with some of Berkeley's faculty voicing their concerns that the university was selling out to the industry giant.
He is an early signatory to "Project Steve," an educational campaign supporting the conventional scientific understanding of evolution.
Chu comes from a family of scholars. His father earned an advanced chemical engineering degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught at Washington University in St. Louis and Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, while his mother studied economics. His mother's grandfather earned advanced civil engineering degrees at Cornell University and his mother's granduncle studied physics at the Sorbonne before they returned to China. His older brother Gilbert Chu is a professor and researcher of biochemistry and medicine at Stanford University.
Chu married Jean Fetter, a British American and an Oxford-trained physicist, in 1997. He has two sons from a previous marriage.
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Chu will be the first Chinese American to hold the office of Energy Secretary and the first person appointed to the Cabinet after having won a Nobel Prize.
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