Steven Chu
Secretary of Energy

Status: Named; needs to be formally nominated and confirmed by Senate

About Steven Chu

Steven Chu, director of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will be nominated as energy secretary, Democratic officials said.

Mr. Chu was one of three scientists who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997 for work in cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. He's a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and has been the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004,
where he has pushed for research into alternative energy as a way to combat global warming. It is the oldest of the Energy Department's national laboratories, doing only unclassified work, and in recent years under Mr. Chu has been at the center of research into biofuels and solar technologies.