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Rocket Scientist/Nobel Prize Winner For Energy Secretary

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Barack, Energy, Science

Steven Chu is the pick and his background is beyond impressive.

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be the next energy secretary, and he has picked veteran regulators from diverse backgrounds to fill three other key jobs on his environmental and climate-change team, Democratic sources said yesterday. [...]

Chu, the son of Chinese immigrants, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for his work in the “development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.” But, in an interview last year with The Washington Post, Chu said he began to turn his attention to energy and climate change several years ago. “I was following it just as a citizen and getting increasingly alarmed,” he said. “Many of our best basic scientists [now] realize that this is getting down to a crisis situation.”

He sought and won the top job at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2004, leaving the Stanford University faculty to focus on energy issues. Chu was in London last night and unavailable for comment, but the physicist has been, in the words of his Web site, on a “mission” to make the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory “the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.”

My only question…is the guy a good manager? Because while he may be smart as hell, just having a smart guy in there isn’t enough. He has to manage and navigate government bureaucracy, and that’s a whole different ball game.

We shall see.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 and is filed under Barack, Energy, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Rocket Scientist/Nobel Prize Winner For Energy Secretary”

On Data Collection and the Moon | Software Estimation Says:
December 15th, 2008 at 8:44 am
[...] a popular clichÃ© amongst rocket scientists “a launch that is off by one degree will miss the moon by miles.” Okay, so maybe the [...]

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