Steven Chu was sworn into office on January 21, 2009. Prior to his appointment, he was a professor of Physics and of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Chu joined the Physics Department faculty at U.C. Berkeley in 2004. He had served earlier as professor of Physics at Stanford University. Before 1987, he was at Bell Laboratories where he conducted the research that led to his 1997 Nobel Prize in physics, which he shared with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, for methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

Chu is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Sinica, and is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and of the Korean Academy of Science and Engineering.

He serves on the Boards of the Hewlett Foundation, the University of Rochester, and NVIDIA. He served on the Augustine Committee that produced the report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” in 2006.

Chu received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1976 and was a post-doctoral fellow there until 1978. He got his B.S. in 1970 from the University of Rochester.