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Steven Chu Facts

Steven Chu Facts
Steven Chu (born February 28, 1948) is an American physicist. He, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William Daniel Phillips shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light."
Interesting Steven Chu Facts:
In 1943 Steven Chu's father, Ju Chin Chu, immigrated to the US from China to study chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1945 his mother, Ching Chen Li, came to MIT to study economics.
Steven Chu was born in St Louis, Missouri where his father was a professor at Washington University.
After graduation from Garden City High in Garden City, NY, he entered the University of Rochester.
In 1970 he earned a B.A. in mathematics and a B.S. in physics.
He transferred to the University of California, Berkeley on a National Science foundation Graduate Research Fellowship where earned a PhD in 1976.
From 1976 to 1978 he was a researcher at Berkeley.
In 1978 he joined Bell labs and it was there that he and his colleagues researched using laser to trap atoms.
In 1987 he accepted the position of professor at Stanford University.
From 1990 to 1993 he was chair of the Physics Department at Stanford.
At Stanford he became interested in biological physics and he used fluorescence resonance energy transfer and atomic force microscopy to study enzyme and protein activity.
He helped the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology secure funding.
In 2004 he became director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
While at Lawrence Berkeley he developed the Helios project which seeks to develop solar power for transportation.
He also initiated research into biofuels.
From January 2009 to April 2013 he served as the US Secretary of Energy under President Obama.
He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In 1995 he received the Humboldt Prize.
In 2013 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.
He has repeatedly warned of the dangers of climate change caused by our reliance on fossil fuels.


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