Chu Barker's parents were both Starfleet officers aboard the USS Al-Batani . His mother, a Betazoid, was a medical officer and his father, a joined Trill was a science officer. When Barker was born, his mother took up the opportunity to return to Betazed as the Chief Medical Officer at the main Betazed medical facility situated on the shores of Lake Cataria. This allowed her to bring up her son and later, on Chu's sister Samiz, in a secure environment and not aboard a starship.

Barker was born with his telepathic abilities in place and as such suffered from nightmares as a child. As his abilities increased, he began to 're-transmit' the nightmare telepathically to those around him. The solution was to insert a neural pacifier into his brain which suppressed the telepathic activities whilst Chu was unconscious. Analysis of the nightmares showed that they were telepathic premonitions from the near future and Barker has retained the ability of precognition in a limited form.

Once both her children were old enough, she returned to Starfleet. When his mother was killed by a sneak Jem'Hadar attack whilst answering a faked distress call, Barker abandoned his place on the Trill host program and instead joined Starfleet. If he had continued, he would have been the first cross-species host to be accepted to be joined with a symbiont.

Whilst at the Academy, he concentrated on the science program and graduated with honours in both isolinear and bioneural computer systems programming. As his field assignment, he was at Jupiter station, where he worked in the holoprogramming centre. This included working on the development of the new long-term medical hologram (LTMH) and improving the EMH interface systems.

After graduating from the Academy, he returned to Jupiter station where he again assisted Doctor Zimmerman until a disagreement about an advanced hologram named ASHER discovered by the USS Enterprise-E made him make the decision to leave Jupiter.

Barker spent the next two years moving from ship to ship, finding it difficult to adjust to life in space. Eventually, he accepted a planet-based assignment on Bajor. There, he worked on the development of a transpectral sensor array that would allow the scanning of and navigation in the Badlands. The original purpose of the array was to help track down the Maquis, until they were all but wiped out by the Dominion\Cardassian alliance. The project had been continued in-case anyone attempted to use the Badlands in the same way again.

The project was finally shelved and Barker accepted the position of assistant science officer aboard the USS Leviathan. Once aboard the Leviathan, Ensign Barker's skills came to the fore and his experience of leading a research team allowed him to act as Chief Science Officer on a temporary basis.

Ensign Barker was eventually prompted to Lieutenant Junior Grade and given the position on a permanent basis, when an unfortunate accident killed the assigned Science Chief before he'd even taken up his position. After serving on the Leviathan for about six months, Barker was promoted to full Lieutenant.

Later, in April 2383, Barker was promoted again to Lieutenant Commander by Captain Devore for the contributions to the shipboard sciences and improvements made to the over-all functioning of the Leviathan.

Barker was re-united with the Hologram ASHER when ASHER arrived onboard the Leviathan after a trip through an inter-dimensional wormhole. Although at first difficult, the two of them have put behind them their past disagreements.