Paul K Chu was born in Hong Kong and attended both primary and secondary organization at St. Joseph's Anglo-Chinese organization. He enrolled in the honors program at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio and won the Summa Award, The Arts and Sciences Award, as well as the prestigious American Chemical Society (ACS) Student Fellowship to work at New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts on trace metal analysis of sea water during the summer of 1976. He received his BS in mathematics (Cum Laude and Phi Kappa Phi) from Ohio State in 1977 and attended graduate organization at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He won the DuPont teaching award as a teaching assistant at Cornell in 1978 and joined the research group of Prof. George H Morrison of the Department of Chemistry. Prof. Morrison was one of the prominent figures in analytical chemistry having been involved with the Apollo moon expedition program. Prof. Morrison was a winner of the ACS Analytical Chemistry Award and Editor-in-Chief of Analytical Chemistry, the premier journal in analytical chemistry published by the American Chemical Society. Under the supervision of Prof. Morrison and Prof. James W Mayer of the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Paul conducted research on ion beam processing and characterization of semiconductors and received his MS and PhD in chemistry in 1979 and 1982, respectively.