STATED MEETING: University of California, Berkeley
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The World’s
Energy Problem and What We Can Do About It
Click speaker names for individual audio.
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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.
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Speaker:
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Photo by
Roy Kaltschmidt
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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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