Academician Steven Chu was nominated to lead the Department of Energy of American President-elect Obama’s new administrative team. Academician Chu, the laureate of Nobel Prize Physics in 1997, is now the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA.

If the United States Senate approves the nomination, Academician Chu will be the second Chinese American minister up to now.

       Academician Chu's research field includes Physics and Molecular and Cell Biology. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for developing methods to cool and trap atoms using lasers. Academician Chu has lead the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004, and he has focused on research on biofuels, energy efficiency and solar energy for scientific solutions to the problems of global warming and the need for carbon-neutral renewable sources of energy.