Steven Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist of Chinese descent, brings a distinguished science background and passion for tackling climate change to president-elect Barack Obama's energy team, dpa reported.
Chu, who was named Obama's energy secretary on Monday, has become one of the country's most outspoken advocates on the science and solutions to global warming, calling it the greatest challenge facing science."
Since 2004, he has headed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of 24 regional labs around the country supervised by the US Energy Department that he will be taking over.
Chu reorganized the Lawrence Berkeley Lab around a new mission to help develop alternative energy solutions that would be key to reducing the country's emissions of greenhouse gases chiefly blamed for global warming.
Those actions dovetail with Obama's promise to step up the United States' response to global warming and the appointment was welcomed by environmental groups in the US.
But his passion for climate change is a far cry from Chu's earlier career as a top-rated physicist.
From 1987 to 2004, Chu was a professor at Stanford University, focusing on research in atomic and molecular biophysics. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing new methods to cool and trap atoms using laser light.
Chu, 60, became convinced that the science behind climate change was solid and that action had to be taken to avert the worst consequences of a warming planet, including stronger storms, longer droughts and rising sea levels.
At the Berkeley lab, which counts 11 Nobel laureates in its ranks, Chu has spearheaded research on alternative energy including solar power and bio-fuels. His lab also created a new flourescent light bulb and has been working on other ways to boost energy efficiency.
But Chu also became convinced that technology and market solutions would not be enough, arguing it was up to the US government to force companies to factor pollution into their operations.
Chu supported placing a "price" on the carbon-dioxide emissions that contribute most to global warming, which would encourage more innovation by forcing industries to pay for the pollution they emit.
"This will not be solved by technology alone. Everybody needs to pitch in," he said in April at a California energy conference.
Obama has promised to unveil a cap-and-trade system in the United States, which would limit the emissions of firms and allow cleaner companies to trade pollution permits with dirtier firms.
Mandatory caps on emissions have long been opposed by President George W Bush, to the chagrin of most environmental groups and even some businesses that worried states would create a patchwork of regulations by taking on the challenge separately.
Chu was born in the US and raised in New York. His parents emigrated to the US from China in the 1940s.
He has a PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley - where he is also a professor - but describes himself as the "academic black sheep" of a family that has a long scholastic history.