2007-9-14

Steven Chu was born on February 28, 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. His homeplace is in east China's Jiangsu Taicang. His Father Zhu Ru-Jin was an internationally renowned chemical engineering expert; his mother Li Jingzhen had enrolled in the MIT. In 1970, he graduated from the University of Rochester, and won the Bachelors of Mathematics and Physics. In 1976, he received doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley and stayed for two years doing postdoctoral research after that. In 1978, he went to work in the Bell Telephone Laboratory, and named as the Director of the Quantum Electronics Research Department in 1983. In 1987, he was named as Professor of the Department of Physics at Stanford University and in 1990 as the Department Director of the school. In June 1993, he was elected as an Academician of the National Academy of Science, USA. In June 2004, he was appointed as the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, under the Department of Energy of the United States, officially filled on August 1.

Steven Chu's research areas cover basic atomic physics, laser, biophysics, etc. In 1997, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "invention of laser cooling and atoms trapping methods", with the co-sharers William Phillips, an American scientist and a French scholar. He also won the King Faisal International Prize for Science.

Steven Chu has visited China many times. On June 5, 1998, he was elected as a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Science.