Steven Chu

Information about Steven Chu

Steven Chu
朱棣?
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Steven Chu

Steven Chu
Born1948
St. Louis, Missouri.
Citizenship U.S.
FieldPhysics
Notable prizes Nobel Prize in Physics (1997)


Steven Chu (Chinese: 朱棣文; Pinyin: Zhū Dìwén), born 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri,[1] is an American experimental physicist. He is known for his research in laser cooling and trapping of atoms, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997.<ref name="Nobel" /> 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 . Chu's role in promoting the clout of the closely aligned research programs at the lab and UC Berkeley helped convince BP to pick the campus for its $500 million biofuels institute.

Nearly $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. And a $160 million Energy Biosciences Institute to be built in three years and funded by BP will include Chu's separate solar energy program. The expansion will put the Lawrence Berkeley labs and UC Berkeley at the center of the world's push for alternative fuels.

Education and career

Steven Chu received his bachelor’s degree in 1970 from the University of Rochester, and his doctorate degree from University of California, Berkeley in 1976.<ref name="Nobel" /> He remained at Berkeley as a Postdoc for two years before joining Bell Labs where he and his several co-workers carried out his Nobel-winning laser cooling work.<ref name="Nobel" /> None of his co-workers, however, were recognized with the Nobel Prize. He left Bell Labs and became a professor of Physics in Stanford University in 1987.<ref name="Nobel" /> Steven Chu has served as the chair of the Physics Department in Stanford University from 1990-1993 and 1999-2001. He was appointed as the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2004.

Chu, with three other professors, was involved with the Bio-X program in Stanford that is intended to bring together scientists from physics, chemistry, biology and engineering background under one roof, the James H. Clark Center. He also played an important role for the funding of Kavli Institute at Stanford.

Research

Steven Chu’s early research focused on atomic physics by developing methods to cool and trap atoms using lasers. He expanded his research area to polymer physics and biophysics while he was at Stanford. His current research focuses on the study of biological molecules and systems at single molecular level. Many Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows from his group have become professors at research universities around the world.

Honors and awards

Steven Chu is a co-winner of Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”, shared with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Sinica. He is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Korean Academy of Sciences and Technology.

Personal life

Besides his scientific career, he also developed serious interest in various sports, including baseball, swimming, and cycling. He is currently married to Jean Chu, an Oxford-trained physicist who was previously married to Alexander Fetter, another Stanford physicist. Jean and Steven married shortly after Steven Chu received the Nobel Prize. An interesting sidenote is that Alexander Fetter had in fact lobbied hard for Steven Chu to be hired at Stanford, and was somewhat dismayed when his wife abruptly divorced him to marry his more prestigious colleague.

Chu was the keynote speaker for Boston University's 134th commencement ceremony which took place on May 20, 2007.

Chu's younger brother, Morgan Chu, is the former Co-Managing Partner at Irell & Manella LLP, a law firm.

His older brother Gilbert Chu is a professor and researcher of Biochemistry and Medicine at Stanford University.

References

1. ^ [1998] "Steven Chu Autobiography", in Tore Frängsmyr: The Nobel Prizes 1997, Les Prix Nobel. Stockholm: The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-06-25. 
  • http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1997/chu-autobio.html
  • Chu S, Hollberg L, Bjorkholm JE, Cable A, Ashkin A. Three-dimensional viscous confinement and cooling of atoms by resonance radiation pressure. Phys Rev Lett. 1985;55(1):48-51
  • Chu S, Bjorkholm JE, Ashkin A, Cable A. Experimental observation of optically trapped atoms. Phys Rev Lett. 1986;57(3):314-317.
  • Perkins TT, Quake SR, Smith DE, Chu S. Relaxation of a single DNA molecule observed by optical microscopy. Science. 1994;264(5160):822-6.
  • Quake SR, Babcock H, Chu S. The dynamics of partially extended single molecules of DNA. Nature. 1997;388(6638):151-4.
  • Ha T, Rasnik I, Cheng W, Babcock HP, Gauss GH, Lohman TM, Chu S. Initiation and re-initiation of DNA unwinding by the Escherichia coli Rep helicase. Nature. 2002;419(6907):638-41.
  • Zhuang X, Kim H, Pereira MJ, Babcock HP, Walter NG, Chu S. Correlating structural dynamics and function in single ribozyme molecules. Science. 2002;296(5572):1473-6.
  • Blanchard SC, Kim HD, Gonzalez RL Jr, Puglisi JD, Chu S. tRNA dynamics on the ribosome during translation. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004;101(35):12893-8.
  • Uemura S, Dorywalska M, Lee TH, Kim HD, Puglisi JD, Chu S.Peptide bond formation destabilizes Shine-Dalgarno interaction on the ribosome. Nature. 2007;446(7134):454-7.

External links

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Nobel Prize in Physics Laureates
1901-1925
Rntgen (1901) • Lorentz / Zeeman (1902) • Becquerel / P.Curie / M.Curie (1903) • Rayleigh (1904) • Lenard (1905) • Thomson (1906) • Michelson (1907) • Lippmann (1908) • Marconi / Braun (1909) • van der Waals (1910) • Wien (1911) • Daln (1912) • Kamerlingh Onnes (1913) • von Laue (1914) • W.L.Bragg / W.H.Bragg (1915) • Barkla (1917) • Planck (1918) • Stark (1919) • Guillaume (1920) • Einstein (1921) • N.Bohr (1922) • Millikan (1923) • M.Siegbahn (1924) • Franck / Hertz (1925)
1926-1950
Perrin (1926) • Compton / Wilson (1927) • Richardson (1928) • De Broglie (1929) • Raman (1930) • Heisenberg (1932) • Schrdinger / Dirac (1933) • Chadwick (1935) • Hess / C.D.Anderson (1936) • Davisson / Thomson (1937) • Fermi (1938) • Lawrence (1939) • Stern (1943) • Rabi (1944) • Pauli (1945) • Bridgman (1946) • Appleton (1947) • Blackett (1948) • Yukawa (1949) • Powell (1950)
1951-1975
Cockcroft / Walton (1951) • Bloch / Purcell (1952) • Zernike (1953) • Born / Bothe (1954) • Lamb / Kusch (1955) • Shockley / Bardeen / Brattain (1956) • Yang / T.D.Lee (1957) • Čerenkov / Frank / Tamm (1958) • Segr / Chamberlain (1959) • Glaser (1960) • Hofstadter / Mssbauer (1961) • Landau (1962) • Wigner / Goeppert‑Mayer / Jensen (1963) • Townes / Basov / Prokhorov (1964) • Tomonaga / Schwinger / Feynman (1965) • Kastler (1966) • Bethe (1967) • Alvarez (1968) • Gell‑Mann (1969) • Alfvn / Nel (1970) • Gabor (1971) • Bardeen / Cooper / Schrieffer (1972) • Esaki / Giaever / Josephson (1973) • Ryle / Hewish (1974) • A.Bohr / Mottelson / Rainwater (1975)
1976-2000
Richter / Ting (1976) • P.W.Anderson / Mott / van Vleck (1977) • Kapitsa / Penzias / Wilson (1978) • Glashow / Salam / Weinberg (1979) • Cronin / Fitch (1980) • Bloembergen / Schawlow / K.Siegbahn (1981) • Wilson (1982) • Chandrasekhar / Fowler (1983) • Rubbia / van der Meer (1984) • von Klitzing (1985) • Ruska / Binnig / Rohrer (1986) • Bednorz / Mller (1987) • Lederman / Schwartz / Steinberger (1988) • Ramsey / Dehmelt / Paul (1989) • Friedman / Kendall / R.E.Taylor (1990) • de Gennes (1991) • Charpak (1992) • Hulse / J.H.Taylor (1993) • Brockhouse / Shull (1994) • Perl / Reines (1995) • D.Lee / Osheroff / Richardson (1996) • Chu / Cohen-Tannoudji / Phillips (1997) • Laughlin / Strmer / Tsui (1998) • 't Hooft / Veltman (1999) • Alferov / Kroemer / Kilby (2000)
2001-2025
Cornell / Ketterle / Wieman (2001) • Davis / Koshiba / Giacconi (2002) • Abrikosov / Ginzburg / Leggett (2003) • Gross / Politzer / Wilczek (2004) • Glauber / Hall / Hnsch (2005) • Mather / Smoot (2006)
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Physics is the science of matter[1] and its motion[2][3], as well as space and time[4][5] —the science that deals with concepts such as force, energy, mass, and charge.
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Nobel Prize in Physics (Swedish: Nobelpriset i fysik) is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the six Nobel Prizes. The first prize was awarded in 1901.
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St. Louis, Missouri

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Nickname: Gateway City, Gateway to the West, or Mound City
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Within the field of physics, experimental physics is the category of disciplines and sub-disciplines which use direct means of observation of physical phenomena in order to obtain data about the universe.
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Laser cooling is a technique that uses light to cool atoms to a very low temperature. It was simultaneously proposed by Wineland and Dehmelt and by Theodor W. Hänsch and Arthur Leonard Schawlow in 1975, and first demonstrated by Wineland and coworkers in 1978.
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atom (Greek ἄτομος or átomos meaning "indivisible") is the smallest particle still characterizing a chemical element.
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Nobel Prize in Physics (Swedish: Nobelpriset i fysik) is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the six Nobel Prizes. The first prize was awarded in 1901.
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A single-molecule experiment investigates the properties of a single individual molecule that can be isolated or distinguished for the purpose of an experiment or analysis.
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The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) is a scientific organization, based in the United States although with over 43,000 members throughout the world. It is the largest single life science professional organization and its members include those whose interests encompass basic
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University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. Commonly referred to as UC Berkeley, Berkeley and Cal
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Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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Director Steve Chu

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Global warming refers to the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans in recent decades and its projected continuation.

The global average air temperature near the Earth's surface rose 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.
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University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. Commonly referred to as UC Berkeley, Berkeley and Cal
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Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) is part of the research and development organization of Alcatel-Lucent and previously the United States Bell System.
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Laser cooling is a technique that uses light to cool atoms to a very low temperature. It was simultaneously proposed by Wineland and Dehmelt and by Theodor W. Hänsch and Arthur Leonard Schawlow in 1975, and first demonstrated by Wineland and coworkers in 1978.
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Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) is part of the research and development organization of Alcatel-Lucent and previously the United States Bell System.
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Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University or simply Stanford, is a private university located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest of San Jose in Stanford,
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Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University or simply Stanford, is a private university located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest of San Jose in Stanford,
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Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Motto View into the future
Established August 26, 1931
Research Type Unclassified
Budget $500 million

Director Steve Chu

Staff 4000
Students 800

Location Berkeley, CA
..... Click the link for more information.
Stanford University Bio-X Initiative is part of Stanford University and is located in the James H. Clark Center in Stanford, California, adjacent to Palo Alto and Menlo Park.

Bio-X focuses on interdisciplinary life science research.
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Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University or simply Stanford, is a private university located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (32 km) northwest of San Jose in Stanford,
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Physics is the science of matter[1] and its motion[2][3], as well as space and time[4][5] —the science that deals with concepts such as force, energy, mass, and charge.
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