Nobel-Winning Physicist Rumored to Be Obama’s Pick for Energy Secretary

steven chu primer

If the rumors are true, and I dearly hope they are, President-elect Barack Obama could not have made a better choice to head up the Department of Energy than Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu.

At his current post as the director of the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Chu’s goal has been nothing short of solving the world’s energy problems. When I interviewed him four years ago for the Contra Costa Times when he took the job as director, he told me, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could solve this problem? I think we’re poised to help in a major way.”

Since then he has been hard at work chasing this ambitious goal, and making an impressive amount of progress. He was the driving force behind big energy projects at Berkeley Lab such as the solar energy initiative known as Helios, set to begin construction in 2010.

He also led the way in creating the Joint BioEnergy Institute which is working toward developing biofuels and the Energy Biosciences Institute.

Chu won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997 for work he did at Bell Labs devising a way to cool, trap and manipulate individual atoms with laser light. After Bell Labs, he worked at Stanford University where he was a driving force behind a $150 million project called Bio-X designed to bring scientists from different fields together to solve problems. In 2004, he became the first Asian American to head a DOE lab.

The potential to make an impact by finding and developing a new source of sustainable energy for the world is what drew him to Berkeley Lab.

And now he is on the verge of being in a position to make a much bigger impact as Secretary of Energy. If he does indeed land the job, I have no doubt that it will be a very good thing for the country.

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