Departing Energy Secretary Chu heads back to Stanford

By Ben Geman - 02/22/13 04:09 PM ET

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is heading back to the ivory tower after several years in the rough and tumble world of Beltway politics.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who announced plans to step down three weeks ago, will return to Stanford University, where he was a physics professor from 1987-2004.

Chu will hold a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and the School of Medicine’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, according to Stanford, and will teach both graduates and undergraduates.

Chu intends to launch an initiative in “advanced bio-imaging,” and will also be working with other faculty on topics related to energy efficiency and the economics of energy, the school announced.

“I want to return to ... the marriage of physics, biology and biomedicine,” Chu told The Stanford Daily, which first reported on his planned return to the university. “That is a very exciting frontier.”

Chu, when announcing Feb. 1 that he planned to leave the Energy Department, said at the time that he wanted to return to the West Coast and academic life, but didn’t lay out specific plans.

He left Stanford in 2004 to become the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and, at the same time, joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley as a professor of physics and biology.

Chu told the The Stanford Daily that choosing between a return to Stanford or Berkeley was tough, but the paper reports that “the presence of four of Chu’s grandchildren in Palo Alto proved to be a critical factor.”

“They’re both great universities, but I’m very happy to be coming back to Stanford,” Chu told the paper.

Henry Kissinger’s famous quip about academic politics notwithstanding, Chu will likely find Stanford more hospitable in some ways than Washington, D.C.

He has been the target of frequent GOP attacks over the failure of some Energy Department-backed green energy companies.

Chu has not set a date for when he will leave the Energy Department.

He noted in his resignation announcement that he would remain at least until the end of February, and perhaps beyond “so that I can leave the Department in the hands of the new Secretary.”

President Obama has not yet nominated a successor to Chu, but Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Ernest Moniz is believed to be the top candidate.