The Resume

(February 28, 1948- )
Born in St. Louis, Missouri
Physicist
Worked at Bell Laboratories (1978-87)
Directed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2004-09)
Co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light (1997)
US Secretary of Energy (2009- )

Why he might be annoying:

He feels gas prices in America are too low. ('Somehow, we have got to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.')
Vice-President Joe Biden got snippy with him for going off-message during a photo op, then observed, 'He won a Nobel Prize. I got elected seven times.'
He said that a cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gases 'is an absolutely nonpartisan issue.'
A former Lawrence Berkeley colleague said, 'Chu likes flashy, sexy technological fixes that attract a lot of attention. He gets bored when they aren't nano-this or bio-that.'
He is the central figure in the Solyndra scandal in which a solar panel manufacturer got $535 million in Department of Energy loan guarantees, then went bankrupt.
Six months before Solyndra went belly-up, he declared himself 'confident they can repay' the loan.
Newt Gingrich demanded that he be fired for 'grossly mismanaging federal dollars.'

Why he might not be annoying:

He noted that as an A- student, he was considered the family 'academic black sheep' compared to his valedictorian brother.
He bikes to work and climbs the seven flights of stairs to his office.
He managed to continue his scientific research while in office, publishing two papers on gravitational redshift in 2010.
He said about attempts to pretend that there is a scientific debate about global warming occurring, 'This reminds me exactly of what we saw in the tobacco industry.'
Some of his ideas for combating global warming were praised by the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
During a Daily Show appearance, he presented Jon Stewart with a 'Nerds of America Society' t-shirt.

Credit: C. Fishel

Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

• 20th Century Scientists
• 21st Century Scientists
• C. Fishel's Profiles [Series 39]
• I Attended Ted Kennedy's Funeral [August 28, 2009]
• I Attended University of California, Berkeley
• I Earned a Doctorate
• I Married in 1997
• I Was the Designated Survivor [United States] (Ranked: 2009)
• I Was the Designated Survivor [United States] (Ranked: 2013)
• Linked to Barack Obama
• Nobel Prize for Physics (Ranked: 1997)
• Profiles 32001-32250 (Ranked: 32027)
• Rolling Stone's 100 People Who Are Changing America [March 2009] (Ranked: 24)
• Scientists
• Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2009 [May 2009]

Year In Review:

In 2023, Out of 18 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
In 2022, Out of 28 Votes: 57.14% Annoying
In 2021, Out of 75 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
In 2020, Out of 11 Votes: 36.36% Annoying
In 2019, Out of 5 Votes: 40.0% Annoying
In 2018, Out of 41 Votes: 48.78% Annoying
In 2017, Out of 23 Votes: 56.52% Annoying
In 2016, Out of 30 Votes: 53.33% Annoying
In 2015, Out of 64 Votes: 57.81% Annoying
In 2014, Out of 61 Votes: 52.46% Annoying
In 2013, Out of 350 Votes: 67.71% Annoying
In 2012, Out of 784 Votes: 80.23% Annoying
In 2011, Out of 22 Votes: 90.91% Annoying