Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Director Steven Chu will be Barack Obama's nominee for Secretary of Energy according to reports in CNN and Reuters today. He will be one of the most scientifically qualified people to hold the position of Secretary of Energy.
Chu shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light." He was at Stanford University at the time but then moved to Berkeley to become director of LBNL. His research interests moved to include biophysics and he became a strong and vocal supporter of climate and energy research.
It will be interesting to see if he can pass on the messages in the lecture "What Our Next President Needs to Know" held at LBNL in October 2008. (Watch a video of the lecture here.)
Chu gave a presentation at a symposium in his honor at LBNL in August 2008 about his work on laser trapping and cooling, single molecule biophysics, and energy science.
