Nobel Laureate US President-Elect Barack Obama's Choice to Head Department of Energy. (December 13, 2008)

Steven Chu is the current Professor of Physics and Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley as well as being director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Together with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips he was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light".

As reported by Nature US President-Elect Barack Obama's choice of Professor Chu to head the department of Energy is seen "as a message that not only will energy research be an administration priority, but [also] that science itself will have a voice at the table. 'It's really pulling science out of the shadows in the United States,' says Philip Bucksbaum, a physicist at Stanford University in California and a friend of Chu's since graduate school in the 1970s. 'It's just exciting to know that there's a physicist — a really smart one and not at all quiet and retiring — sitting at the Cabinet table.'"

Professor Bucksbaum believes that as his friend could move from chairing Stanford's department of physics to directing the LBNL, he'll be able to survive atop the DoE. "My prediction is that he'll learn how to live in their world. He's a quick study".

In addition Steven Chu is no stranger to industry. From 1978 to 1987 he was employed at Bell Labs where he and his several co-workers carried out his Nobel Prize-winning laser cooling work. He left Bell Labs in 1987 to take up his appointment at Stanford University. Currently he is focusing efforts at LBNL to develop technologies to reduce the impact of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.