Chu is currently the Secretary of Energy for the United States, Department of Energy, prior to that he was the director of the UC-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips) for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

Chu received a Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1976. He was a postdoctoral fellow, UC Berkeley, 1976-78; member of the Technical Staff, AT&T Bell Labs; head of the Quantum Electronic Dept., AT&T Bell Labs, 1983-87; and professor of physics and applied physics at Stanford University, 1987-2004.

Dr. Chu's many honors and awards include the American Physical Society Broida Prize for Laser Spectroscopy, 1987; the King Faisal International Prize for Science, 1993; the American Physical Society, Arthur Schawlow Prize for Laser Science, 1994; the Humboldt Senior Scientist Award, 1995; and the Nobel Prize in Physics. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Academia Sinica, the American Philosophical Society, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Korean Academy of Sciences and Technology, 1998.

He was a member of the Executive Committee, NAS Board of Physics and Astronomy, 1996-99.