Template:POTD/2018-09-24

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Steven Chu (born 1948) is an American physicist and former government official. Born in St Louis into a family with Chinese ancestry, Chu studied at the University of Rochester and then earned a PhD in physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He became a researcher, first at Bell Labs and then later as a professor at Stanford University. In 1997 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with two colleagues, for the "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light". In 2009, Chu was appointed United States Secretary of Energy in the first administration of president Barack Obama, a position he held until 2013.Photograph: Royal Society uploader