Steven Chu was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 28, 1948. He attended the University of Rochester, from which he received a B.S. in physics and A.B. degree in mathematics. He then continued his education at the University of California at Berkeley, which awarded him a Ph.D. in physics in 1976. He remained at Berkeley for two more years, then accepted a position at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

In 1983, he was appointed head of the quantum electronics research department at the AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. It was during this time that Chu conducted the experiments for which he was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics.

This research was motivated by a growing interest on the part of scientists to study the properties of individual particles, such as atoms, molecules, and ions. Such an objective would have seemed absurd only a few decades...