Steven Chu (Chinese: 朱棣文; born February 28, 1948) 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 Barack Obama administration 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. As of 2022, 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.
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