Stated Meeting, Berkeley, CA
Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Greetings:		Robert J. Birgeneau (6 min.) became the ninth Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. An internationally distinguished physicist, he is a leader in higher education and is well known for his commitment to diversity and equity in the academic community. Before coming to Berkeley, Birgeneau served for four years as President of the University of Toronto. He previously was Dean of the School of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he spent 25 years on the faculty. He is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, has received many awards for teaching and research, and is among the most cited physicists in the world for his work on the fundamental properties of materials. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1987 and was honored with the Academy’s Founders Award in 2006.
Speaker:	Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt	Steven Chu (60 min.) became the sixth Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2004. He is also Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1978, he joined the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he became the head of the Quantum Electronics Department and began his groundbreaking work in cooling and trapping atoms by using laser light. In 1987 he joined the faculty of Stanford University, where he became the Theodore and Francis Geballe Professor of Physics and Applied Physics in 1990. In 1997, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji of France and William D. Phillips of the United States. Their discoveries, focusing on the so-called "optical tweezers" laser trap, were instrumental in the study of fundamental phenomena and in measuring important physical quantities with unprecedented precision. He most recently cochaired an international InterAcademy Council study, "Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future." A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Academia Sinica, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and of the Korean Academy of Science and Engineering, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1992. To view slides while listening to Steven Chu, click here.

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