Profile:Steven Chu

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:59:17 +0000

Steven Chu, Ph.D (born February 28, 1948), is an American physicist and currently 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.
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.
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, a notable physical scientist, 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 the law firm Irell & Manella LLP. According to Chu, his two brothers and four cousins earned three M.D.s, four Ph.D.s, and a J.D. among them. In 1997, he married Jean Fetter, a British American and an Oxford-trained physicist. He has two sons, Geoffrey and Michael, from a previous marriage to Lisa Chu-Thielbar.
Beside his scientific career, Chu has also developed interest in various sports, including baseball, swimming and cycling. On May 15, 2009, he made a surprise appearance at Bike-to-Work Day in Washington DC, where he stated his goal to decrease his cycling time from Chevy Chase, Maryland to the Georgetown boathouse from 18 to 15 minutes. 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. Chu said 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.

Energy and Me » Profile:Steven Chu

Profile:Steven Chu