Born in Hunan in 1941 and raised in Guangdong. He graduated from the Department of Physics at National Cheng Kung University in 1962 and, after a year of service in the Air Force, went to the United States for advanced study. He received an M.S. in physics from Fordham University in New York in 1965 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, San Diego in 1968. After graduating, he worked at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. In 1970 he joined the faculty of Cleveland State University, and in 1979 he became a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Houston, Texas. When the University of Houston established the Texas Center for Superconductivity in 1987, he became its director and was also named the TLL Temple Foundation Chair Professor. In 2001 he concurrently became President of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

In January 1987, Prof. Chu discovered stable superconductivity above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, opening a new era in high-temperature superconductivity research and applications; this major breakthrough has been hailed as one of the most important achievements of modern physics. He has devoted himself to high-temperature superconductivity research with outstanding results and has received many awards and honors, including the U.S. National Medal of Science and the International Prize for New Materials. In 2000 he was invited to place a sample of the superconductor he discovered in the National Millennium Time Capsule at the White House, and in 1990 he was named the top researcher in the United States by U.S. News & World Report.

Prof. Chu is a member of academic institutions including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Sinica (Taiwan), the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, and the Russian Academy of Engineering, and is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Academic Honors
1987 Leroy Randall Grumman Medal
1988 Comstock Prize, National Medal of Science, NASA Achievement Award, Academician of Academia Sinica
1989 International Prize for New Materials, Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
1990 Texas Instruments Founders Prize
1994 Bernd Matthias Materials Prize
1996 Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
2001 Freedoms Foundation National Award
2005 Member of the Russian Academy of Engineering