Obama Names Steven Chu Secretary of Energy

US President Barack Obama has nominated Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu, professor of physics and head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be secretary of energy. Chu was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his bachelor's degree in 1970 from the University of Rochester and his doctorate from University of California (UC), Berkeley in 1976. He joined Bell Labs in 1978, and was appointed Professor of Physics at Stanford University in 1987. Chu's research on methods using laser light to cool and trap atoms earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997.

Chu was appointed director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in August 2004. He is also a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and honorary professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.