Steven Chu

In 1997, Chu married Jean Fetter, a British citizen. Steven and Jean live with Steven's two sons from his first marriage to Lisa Chu-Thielbar, an astrobiologist.

Steven Chu was born on February 28, 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri to parents of Chinese-American ancestry. His father, Ju-Chin Chu, was a professor with a doctorate in chemical engineering. His mother, Ching Chen Li, studied economics and he has two brothers Gilbert and Morgan Chu.

As a teenager, he attended ‘Garden City High School’ in New York City. In his area of the city, Steven's family was the only one of Chinese ancestry.

In 1970, Chu graduated from the ‘University of Rochester’ with a Bachelor degree in Mathematics and a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics.

In 1976, he received a Doctorate of Physics from the ‘University of California’ at Berkeley. For the next two years, he would serve as a Fellow at the same university, where he worked to develop new techniques with lasers.

In 1978, he was hired as the Director of Quantum Electronics Research for ‘Bell Laboratories’. He would hold this position for the next four years.

In 1983, he became a research physicist for ‘Bell Laboratories’, where he would continue to serve for the next five years. During his time at Bell Labs, Chu and his fellow researchers developed new techniques to cool and trap individual atoms.

In 1987, he became a professor of Applied Physics at ‘Stanford University’. He would continue to hold this title for the next 17 years.

Between 1990-2001 he served as the Chair of the Physics Department at ‘Stanford University’ on two occasions. While at Stanford, Chu and three other scientists founded the ‘Bio-X program’, an interdisciplinary research organization.

Dr. Steven Chu served as the United States Secretary of Energy from 2009-2013 in the Obama Administration. As the Secretary of Energy, Chu led the investigation related to the ‘Deepwater Horizon’ oil spill and stressed on developing alternate means of energy and creating awareness about the harmful effects of fossil fuels.

He has published over 260 academic papers, holds 10 patents, is a member of several international prestigious scientific organizations, and has been awarded many elite distinctions by scientific organizations and honorary degrees at university in over a dozen different countries.