By Patricia Daukantas
OSA Honorary Member Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to lead the U.S. Department of Energy.
Democratic officials announced Obama’s environmental team to the media last night, according to the Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN.
Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics for their work in laser cooling and trapping atoms. OSA named Chu a Fellow in 1991 and an Honorary Member in 2003. In 1994, he received OSA’s William F. Meggers Award for outstanding work in spectroscopy.
At Frontiers in Optics 2006, OSA’s 90th annual meeting, Chu gave a plenary talk devoted to energy efficiency and the search for alternative fuels, including solar energy.