Just heard this on NPR tonight. Wow, Dr. Steven Chu has had quite the career! He was one of the two reasons I went to Stanford for my phd. The year I arrived and planned to rotate with him, he won the Nobel prize and really seemed overly busy for a student like me that liked attention. After winning the nobel prize, he met with the president of China (an engineer), who I imagine tried to recruit him to help with science education in China. He also went to my alma mater for undergrad (University of Rochester). After enough of us complained about not having enough preparation for the qualifying exams at Stanford, he taught for a couple of years a “Back of the Envelope Physics” class, which I still have the notes for. I was on the Stanford presidential search committee in 1999/2000 and Professor Chu was on the previous search committee (along with Condi Rice), and he gave me good advice for that adventure. I eventually did my research in biophysics with Steven Boxer, and Professor Chu was my co-advisor in the physics department. When I returned to finish my PhD, he had already “moved on” to direct the National Livermore Labs. He was a very demanding professor and the students in his lab rarely did anything other than work, but if they persevered, they did very well wherever they went. There’s more, but will hold back. Very happy for him and hope he makes us proud!

Here’s his bio from the Nobel committee and the NPR article.

I’m so very far behind that I thought I’d catch up with the most recent activities and slowly go backwards from there. I’ve posted a lot of new pictures from my many trips, though, already.

Starting off with December. To celebrate the anniversary of my house being broken into, I once again drove down to Kansas to work in Wichita for a few days at the NDB’s office. Played some new games with the family, got lots of work done with daily meetings, teeth cleaned, annual Ada massage, dinner with Fred & Donna, saw William (visiting from Hawaii and a day before he shot a nail through his hand), ate some Gambino’s pizza & Braums’ limeade, and made the 350 mile drive to Mount Hope from Omaha in record time (4.25 hours, nonstop). Needless to say, a full 3 days. After I drove back, I was quickly off to San Francisco again for an ACR meeting. Got to have a small game night on Friday at Terry’s place (great to see Mandi, Doug, Melissa, Emily, Stacie & Mike), gorged myself on excellent dim sum on Saturday, then had meetings the rest of the time at the SF Wharf though with a brief break to take the trolly across the city and watch a late showing of Quantum of Solace (good, but not great as was previous Bond flick). Lots of stories from this past weekend, but maybe most memorable was at the airport. I thought my flight was at 12:30pm and I arrived at 11:45am (no bags to check), only to discover the flight was at 12:03 (have I mentioned that I’m bad at remembering numbers?). I arrived at gate to find no one staffing the area. The plane was still docked and I waved and jumped up and down to get the pilots’ attention to no avail. The computer said they were missing only 1 passenger (me!). The door to the plane had lots of warnings about alarms going off if I tried to enter. 6 minutes later when the plane started to leave I decided to set the alarms off and return to waving - this time the pilots saw me, pointed and got them to re-dock so I could get on board. Not a fun experience and likely bad due to short staffing the area, but fortunate to make it!

Oh, and I beat Jade Empire on my one night in NE between those trips (it’s only an xbox game that’s 4 years old!). It was very impressive, but a sign that time hasn’t been on my side for some time. Stay tuned for much more!!!