Steven Chu

Steven Chu was born on February 28, 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri. Along with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, he was instrumental in determining how to use lasers to slow down and cool atoms – an important step on the road towards getting materials down to temperatures near absolute zero. Chu, Cohen-Tannoudji, and Phillips shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics for their research.

Chu attended the University of Rochester for his undergraduate education and went on to earn his PhD in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1976. He was a professor in physics and applied physics at Stanford from 1987 to 2004, and he currently serves as the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Additional resources:

Steven Chu’s autobiography on the Nobel Prize site http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1997/chu-autobio.html