Obama selects Steven Chu as US Energy Secretary

December 11, 2008

According to reports, Barack Obama, the President-elect of the United States, will nominate Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, to be his Secretary of Energy. Chu has been the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California for the past four years. He shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997 with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips for developing ways to cool and trap atoms with a laser light.

In the past, Chu was the head of an electronics lab at the Bell Labs in New Jersey. He has also worked on solar technologies and global warming, and is a professor at the University of California. Chu has worked on ways to develop carbon-neutral energy.

Chu is currently scheduled to travel Asia and Europe and is expected to be back at work on Monday, according to a spokesperson at Lawrence Berkeley.