Steven Chu was born in 1948 in St. Louis. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on using lasers to trap and cool atoms. He is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics and cellular and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
At the Lawrence Berkeley lab, Chu has focused on developing new fuel technologies to combat global warming. His efforts received a $500 million boost in February, when the energy company BP chose the lab, along with the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to lead a new Energy Biosciences Institute devoted to developing biofuel technology.
