Plenary Lecture Dr. Steven Chu served as the 12th U.S. Secretary of Energy between January 2009 and April 2013 and is currently a professor at Stanford University. Prior to his post in President Obama’s Cabinet, he was the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor at University of California, Berkeley. He had previously worked at Stanford University and Bell Laboratories. Chu is the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics (1997) for his contributions to the laser cooling and trapping of atoms. His other areas of research include tests of fundamental theories in physics, atom interferometry, study of polymers and biological systems at the single molecule level, and biomedical research. The holder of 10 patents, Chu has published 250 scientific and technical papers. Chu is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Academia Sinica, and the Korean Academy of Sciences and Technology, an honorary member of the Institute of Physics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a Lifetime Member of the Optical Society of America. He received bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley.