Nobel Laureate and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu will visit MIT on May 12 and deliver the Compton Lecture. Chu's lecture is titled "The Energy Problem and the Interplay between Basic and Applied Research."
Chu, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997 for his work on the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, is the first Nobel laureate to serve in a U.S. cabinet position. Until his DoE appointment he was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Chu comes from a family of scholars, and his father, Ju Chin Chu, earned his doctorate in chemical engineering from MIT in 1946.
Chu will deliver the Compton Lecture in room 10-250 (Huntington Hall) at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, May 12. He will be introduced by MIT President Susan Hockfield. The lecture series, named in honor of Karl Taylor Compton, MIT's ninth president, began in 1957 and aims to give the MIT community direct contact with the important ideas of our times and with people who have contributed much to modern thought.
The Karl Taylor Compton lecture series is sponsored by the MIT president in conjunction with the Provost's Office.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 6, 2009 (download PDF).
