Steven Chu

Steven Chu FREng ForMemRS (English: Steven Chu, February 28, 1948 -) is a Chinese-American physicist who was born and raised in St. Louis, United States. He won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods for cooling and capturing atoms with lasers. From 2009 to 2013, he served as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy. One of the founding directors of the University of California Chinese Scholars Association. Steven Chu was a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research field mainly focused on studying biological systems at the single-molecule level. Before that, he taught physics at Stanford University. He is an active advocate for more research into renewable and nuclear energy, arguing that switching away from fossil fuels is key to combating climate change. For example, he envisioned a global "glucose economy," a low-carbon economy in which glucose produced by tropical plants would be shipped around the world, much like oil is today.