Breaking News: Obama Picks Physicist Steven Chu as Energy Secretary

Breaking News: Obama Picks Physicist Steven Chu as Energy Secretary (December 10, 2008)
http://www.cnbc.com/id/28163600
Steven Chu (Chinese pinyin: Zhu Dìwén) is 1997 Nobel Prize in physics and is a former chairman of the physics department at Stanford University in California and head of the electronics research laboratory at Bell Labs. Steven Chu is perhaps the first Asian to hold such a high-level job in the US government. This is the right step for Obama to prove to the world that US is really a great country with a great heart that embraces diversity and democracy.

Who is Steven Chu? Here is his detail background info:

Steven Chu (Chinese pinyin: Zhu Dìwén) (born. February 28, 1948, St. Louis, Missouri) is an American experimental physicist and announced by NBC News to be President-elect Barack Obama's future Secretary of Energy. He is known for his research in laser cooling and trapping of atoms, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. His current research is concerned primarily with the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. He is currently Professor of Physics and Molecular and Cellular Biology of University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As global warming warnings grow more dire, Chu is currently pushing his scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and industry to develop technologies to reverse climate change. Chief in Chu's campaign is an unprecedented research pact reached between UC Berkeley, oil industry giant BP, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the University of Illinois. Nearly US$400 million in new lab space will expand energy-related molecular work centered at Lawrence Berkeley that involves a cast of partners around the world; a US$160 million Energy Biosciences Institute (scheduled to open in 2010) and funded by BP will include Chu's separate solar energy program.

Source: Wikipedia

Recent video of Steven Chu: Below is a presentation at this summer's National Clean Energy Summit convened by the University of Nevada Las Vegas where Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Dr. Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, described why he has moved from his background in advanced laser research to tackling global warming, how the optimal way to reduce greenhouse emissions is to invest in energy efficiency, and what he has done to develop "new technologies to transform the landscape."