It came as a landmark news to
World Scientific when Steven
Chu, a prominent Chinese
American scientist, was
nominated on December 10, 2008 by
the then US President-elect Barack
Obama as the next Energy Secretary.
In fact, Professor Steven Chu
shares a long-standing relationship
with World Scientific. Prof Chu,
1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics,
collaborated with World Scientific
in 2001/2002 on the Proceedings of the XV International Conference on
Laser Spectroscopy. His first visit
to Singapore was at the invitation
of World Scientific Publishing in
December 1998 for the launch of
the inaugural World Scientific Nobel
Laureate Public Lecture series. Prof
Chu delivered the first lecture for this
series, holding the audience in awe
with his topic on "The How and
Why of Laser Cooling and Trapping
of Atoms."
The 61-year-old physicist is also
an international advisory board
member of the Institute of Advanced
Studies (IAS) at the Nany ang
Technological University (NTU) since 2005, and our Chairman, Professor K
K Phua, is the director of this Institute.
After Prof Chu came on board as
the international advisor of IAS,
talks have been in progress to pave
the way towards spearheading and
strengthening research collaboration
in photonics technology among NTU,
Shanghai Jiaotong University and the
University of California, Berkeley,
where he is based.
In 2004, Prof Chu, who was then
the chair and professor in Physics
at Stanford University, applied for
and assumed the position of director
of the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory. Under his leadership, Berkeley Lab has become a global
centre of strategic importance in
alternative and renewable energy
research.
In recent years, Prof Chu has
been advocating scientific research
and programs to combat global
warming. He makes a strong
push to broaden the research and
development of alternative sources of
energy, and also strongly advocates
for reduced dependency on fossil fuel
as a measure to diminish the impact
of global warming.
Unknown to many, Prof Chu
earned his BA in mathematics and a
BSc in physics from the University
of Rochester, not the créme de
la créme of colleges like Harvard,
Yale, Stanford and that certainly
gave him greater freedom to indulge
in the research of his passion. He
obtained his PhD in physics from the
University of California, Berkeley.
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