 Steven Chu
Steven Chu was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1948. Two years later, his family moved to Garden City, New York, and he graduated in 1966 from Garden City High School. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and a Bachelor of Science in Physics in 1970 from the University of Rochester, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Physics in 1976 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he continued to work for two years as a postdoctoral fellow in physics.
Dr. Chu began his career in 1978 as a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and in 1983 became the Head of its Quantum Electronics Research Department. During this period he began his pioneering work in laser cooling and trapping of atoms. In 1987, he became a professor in the Physics and Applied Physics Departments at Stanford University, and was appointed the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor of Physics and Applied Physics in 1990. He became the sixth Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004. He is quickly leading LBNL to the forefront of noncarbon energy research.
Dr. Chu has received numerous awards, foremost among them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, shared with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Phillips. Their discoveries focusing on the “optical tweezers” laser trap have made possible the confinement of matter as small as single atoms and have opened the way to detailed study of viruses and even single strands of DNA. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Academia Sinica, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology. Dr. Chu is Co-Chair of a worldwide InterAcademy Council study entitled “Transitions to Sustainable Energy Systems.” He has served on numerous committees, including the Augustine Committee that produced the report Rising Above the Gathering Storm, and the advisory committees to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the National Nuclear Security Agency.
Dr. Chu is married and has two sons.
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