Steven Chu

Steven Chu
12th United States Secretary of Energy
Incumbent
Assumed office January 21, 2009
President	Barack Obama
Preceded by	Samuel Bodman
Personal details
Born	Steven Chu (朱棣文, Zhū Dìwén) (1948-02-28) February 28, 1948 St. Louis, Missouri
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Jean Chu
Alma mater	University of Rochester University of California, Berkeley
Profession	Scientist (Experimental physics)
Website	www.doe.gov

Steven Chu, Ph.D (St. Louis, February 28, 1948), an American physicist, is the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. As a scientist, Chu is known for his research in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. At the time of his appointment as Energy Secretary, he 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. He is 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.

Career and personal life

Chu, a Chinese American, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated from Garden City High School. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1970 from the University of Rochester, and his doctorate degree from University of California, Berkeley in 1976, during which he was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. 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. While at Stanford, Chu, together with three other professors, initiated the Bio-X program, which focuses on interdisciplinary research in biology and medicine, and played an important role in securing the funding of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. In 2004, Chu was appointed as the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, during which time he also accepted a position as a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

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 maternal grandfather earned advanced civil engineering degrees at Cornell University and his mother's uncle Li Shu-hua 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. His younger brother, Morgan Chu, is a partner and the former Co-Managing Partner at Irell & Manella LLP, a law firm. His two brothers and four cousins earned three M.D.s, four Ph.D.s, and a J.D. among them. Chu married Jean Fetter, a British American and an Oxford-trained physicist, in 1997. He has two sons, Geoffrey and Michael, from a previous marriage to Lisa Chu-Thielbar.

Besides his scientific career, Chu has also developed 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 said that he never learned to speak Chinese because his parents always talked to him and his brothers in English, although he said (in 1997) that he was trying to learn Mandarin, believing that if he could stay in China for "at least six months", he would become fluent in Chinese.

Research

Steven Chu’s early research focused on atomic physics by developing laser cooling techniques and trapping 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.

Energy and global warming

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. Chu said that a typical coal power plants emits 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant.

Chu warns that global warming could wipe out California farms within the century.

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 in Copenhagen.

Chu was instrumental in submitting a winning bid for the Energy Biosciences Institute, a BP-funded $500 million multi-disciplinary collaborative project between UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the University of Illinois. This sparked controversy on the Berkeley campus, where some fear the alliance could harm the school’s reputation for academic integrity.

He is an early signatory to Project Steve, an educational campaign supporting the conventional scientific understanding of evolution.

Honors and awards

Steven Chu is a co-winner of Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for the "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 United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Academia Sinica, and is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and of the Korean Academy of Science and Engineering. Dr. Chu also received an honorary doctorate from Boston University when he was the keynote speaker at the 2007 commencement exercises.

Energy Secretary

Steven Chu meeting with President Barack Obama.

His nomination to be Energy Secretary 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 Cabinet after having won a Nobel Prize. He is also the second Chinese American to be a member of the Cabinet after Elaine Chao.

Publications

• Chu, S."Observation of the Forbidden Magnetic Dipole Transition 6{sup 2}P{sub ½} --> 7{sup 2}P{sub ½} in Atomic Thallium", Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, United States Department of Energy (through predecessor agency the Energy Research and Development Administration), (October 1976).

• Chu S; et al. (1985). "Three-dimensional viscous confinement and cooling of atoms by resonance radiation pressure". Phys Rev Lett. 55 (1): 48–51. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.55.48. PMID 10031677. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)

• E. L. Raab, M. Prentiss, A. Cable, S. Chu, and D. E. Pritchard (1987). "Trapping of Neutral Sodium Atoms with Radiation Pressure". Phys Rev Lett. 59 (23): 2631–2634. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.59.2631. PMID 10035608.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

• Chu S, Bjorkholm JE, Ashkin A, Cable A (1986). "Experimental observation of optically trapped atoms". Phys Rev Lett. 57 (3): 314–317. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.57.314. PMID 10034028.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

• Perkins TT, Quake SR, Smith DE, Chu S (1994). "Relaxation of a single DNA molecule observed by optical microscopy". Science. 264 (5160): 822–6. doi:10.1126/science.8171336. PMID 8171336.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

• Quake SR, Babcock H, Chu S (1997). "The dynamics of partially extended single molecules of DNA". Nature. 388 (6638): 151–4. doi:10.1038/40588. PMID 9217154.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

• Ha T; et al. (2002). "Initiation and re-initiation of DNA unwinding by the Escherichia coli Rep helicase". Nature. 419 (6907): 638–41. doi:10.1038/nature01083. PMID 12374984. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)

• Chinga T, Mamada I, Pum P, Chu S (2002). "Quantum coherence aligns single amino-acids for Escherichia coli detonation". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 59 (41): 368–71. doi:10.1073/pnas.59.2.368. PMID 16591608.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

• Zhuang X; et al. (2002). "Correlating structural dynamics and function in single ribozyme molecules". Science. 296 (5572): 1473–6. doi:10.1126/science.1069013. PMID 12029135. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)

• Blanchard SC; et al. (2004). "tRNA dynamics on the ribosome during translation". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 101 (35): 12893–8. doi:10.1073/pnas.0403884101. PMID 15317937. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)

• Uemura S; et al. (2007). "Peptide bond formation destabilizes Shine-Dalgarno interaction on the ribosome". Nature. 446 (7134): 454–7. doi:10.1038/nature05625. PMID 17377584. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)

• Cui, B, Gonzalez RL Jr, Puglisi JD, Chu S. DNA lasers interrogated via Shine-Dalgarno entanglement. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007;144(45):5803-9.

See also

• Timeline of low-temperature technology

External links

• Bio from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • Energy@Berkeley: Solutions for Global Warming, Berkeley University, November 13, 2007 includes link to event on YouTube
  • BP Makes Berkeley World Center for Biofuels press release on the BP collaboration February 16, 2007
  • Alternative Energy Sources March 28, 2005, Chu's PowerPoint presentation
• Boulder’s physicists give Chu thumbs-up Article on other Nobel laureates' reactions to Chu as secretary of energy
• Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
• UCTV Programs with Steven Chu
  • Physics Meets Biology
  • Berkeley's Nobel Tradition
  • Holding on to Atoms and Molecules with Lasers: Laser Cooling - From Atomic Clocks to Watching Biomolecules Move
  • What Can Physics Say About Life?
  • Conversations with History: A Scientist's Random Walk, with Steven Chu
• Bio and personal page from Stanford University Department of Physics
  • Steven Chu: Uncovering the secret life of molecules from Stanford [Online] Report (July 16, 1997)
• Chu's biophysics research group at University of California, Berkeley
  • Growing energy: Berkeley Lab's Steve Chu on what termite guts have to do with global warming from UC Berkeley News (September 30, 2005)
• Chu's lecture on the Helios Project for renewable energy on YouTube March 12, 2008
• The Nobel Prize in Physics 1997 from Nobel Prize with biography, lecture, diploma, photos, symposia and links
• "Climate Disasters a 'Significant Possibility' Interview with Steve Chu at Copenhagen Climate Council, November 3, 2008.
• [2] Interview with Steven Chu from "Growing Energy" from the PBS series e² energy.

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