Who is Chu?

By CJP | December 11, 2008

Have you ever asked yourselves, “Who IS Steven Chu?”  Haven’t we all?

Other than someone who we can only hope ran for 8th-grade class president with pencils that said, “Choose Chu,” he is also Barack Obama’s  pick for Secretary of Energy, announced yesterday.  So what else do we know about the man who’s going to be in charge of keeping our lights on, our cars juiced and our nukes locked (but not loaded)?

• He’s really, really smart.  Chu won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997 for  “the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.”  Totally.
• He’s a first-generation American, who parents immigrated from China.
• He was born in St. Louis, went to University of Rochester and got his Ph.D at Berkeley.
• He’s been a professor and researcher at Stanford and Berkeley, and is currently the head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
• Chu’s official bio calls him, “an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change,” and says he has, “guided Berkeley Lab on a mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research.”

Here he is in a photoshoot for a “Vanity Fair” spread on Nobel Prize winners. So chic, Dr. Chu…

Topics: The Cabinet

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