Born:
February 2, 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri. Raised in Garden City, on New York's Long Island.
Childhood :
Chu's parents came to the United States from China to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1940s. He comes from a long line of scholars: His father studied chemical engineering, his mother economics, and his great-grandfather studied civil engineering at Cornell. Chu's parents married and remained in the United States due to unrest in China during World War Two. They moved to Garden City shortly after Chu was born when his father became a professor at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. At that time, they were only the third Chinese family to live there.
Interest in Physics:
In high school, Chu played tennis and was on the school band. It wasn't until his senior year at Garden City High School, that he took a physics class taught by Thomas Miner. He would later credit Miner for inspiring his future career in the field. Chu wrote that when he went to college at the University of Rochester, he consoled himself with the thought that he could be an anonymous student and out of the shadow of his illustrious family. Chu got his degree in physics and mathematics and went on to get his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.
Bell Laboratories & Stanford University:
In 1978, Chu took a position with the research institution, Bell Laboratories where he developed methods to cool and trap atoms using a laser. He left Bell Laboratories for in 1987 to teach physics at Stanford University. At Stanford, he helped to start Bio-X, an initiative that brings together the physical and biological sciences with engineering and medicine.
Nobel Prize Winner:
In 1997, Chu was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Claude Claud Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, for their work with atoms at Bell Laboratories.
National Laboratory Director:
Chu left Stanford in 2004, after he was appointed director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. At that time he also took a position as a professor of physics his alma mater, UC Berkeley. As the head of the national laboratory, Chu has pushed for finding scientific solutions to climate change and has been an advocate for research in carbon-neutral renewable energy.
U.S. Secretary of Energy:
On December 11, 2008, then U.S. President-elect Barack Obama nominated Chu as energy secretary. The nomination was seen as a signal that Obama is serious about implementing renewable energy technology to reduce carbon emissions. On January 20, 2008, Chu was unanimously confirmed for the position by the Senate. He is the first Chinese-American to run the Department of Energy.
Personal Life:
Chu is married to Jean Chu, a former Dean of Admissions and the President's Chief of Staff at Stanford University. He has two sons, Geoffrey and Michael from a previous marriage. Chu has said that he and his two brothers never learned to speak Chinese because his parents only spoke to him in English. He has attempted to study Mandarin as an adult.