Chu Would be First Chinese-American Energy Secretary

Steven Chu lectures at Stanford University in 1997. (JOHN G. MABANGLO / AFP / Getty Images).

Steven Chu, Barack Obama's pick for Energy Secretary, is yet another historic choice in an already historic presidential election.

The son of Chinese scholar immigrants, Chu was born in St. Louis and raised in Long Island. If confirmed by the Senate, Chu would be the first Chinese-American to run the Department of Energy.

Trained in physics, Chu has had an illustrious career, first as a researcher at Bell Laboratories, then as a physics professor at Stanford University.

In 1997, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work developing ways to cool and trap atoms using lasers at atoms Bell Labs. He has most recently served as the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he has championed renewable energy research and pushed to find scientific solutions to climate change.

Obama's pick is seen by many as a signal of the President-elect's commitment to renewable energy. Check out this video of Steven Chu speaking on climate change.

But here's the funny thing about Chu: Despite all his successes, Chu has said that as a teenager, he often felt overshadowed by his very successful academic family. Both his parents studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his father chemical engineering and his mother economics. His father was a college professor at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.

His great-grandfather studied civil engineering at Cornell, and his great-grand uncle studied physics at the Sorbonne before they both returned to China. Chu's older brother Gilbert was apparently a much better student than him in high school, and now serves as a professor and researcher of biochemistry and medicine at Stanford University.

In his autobiography for the Nobel Prize, Chu writes: "In this family of accomplished scholars, I was to become the academic black sheep. I performed adequately at school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre," Chu wrote.

"I applied to a number of colleges in the fall of my senior year, but because of my relatively lackluster A-average in high school, I was rejected by the Ivy League schools, but was accepted at Rochester... As I prepared to go to college, I consoled myself that I would be an anonymous student, out of the shadow of my illustrious family."

Could Chu's self-deprecation be a uniquely Chinese-American trait? Is it possible that despite all his successes, he still describes his A-average in high school as "lackluster"? And that while he won Nobel freakin' Prize, he still feels the family pressure to succeed?

I guess the only possible way to improve on his past is to serve a pioneering role under a President.