FRANK WILCZEK

Professor Frank Wilczek is considered one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists. When only 21 years old and a graduate student at Princeton University, in work with David Gross he defined the properties of color gluons, which hold atomic nuclei together.

This earliest research included the discovery of asymptotic freedom and the formulation of quantum chromodynamics. Later highlights include the invention of axions and the discovery of their potential role in cosmology, the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics (anyons), the discovery and investigation of color-flavor locking, and the proposal of time crystals. "Axions," "anyons," "color-flavor locking," and "time crystals" are all terms that he introduced, and they have come to define major topics in physics research.

Frank Wilczek received his B.S. degree from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1974. He remained at Princeton through 1980, rising to Professor. From 1981 to 1988 he was the Chancellor Robert Huttenback Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the first permanent member of the National Science Foundation's Institute for Theoretical Physics. In the fall of 2000 he moved from the Institute for Advanced Study (1989 to 2000), where he was the J.R. Oppenheimer Professor, to the MIT Department of Physics, where he is now the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics, Post-Tenure. He is now tenured as the Wager Professor of Physics at Arizona State University (ASU). He has also been Professor at Stockholm University and NORDITA since 2016. In recent years Wilczek has also been active in China. From 2017 to 2022 he served as Founding Director of the T. D. Lee Institute in Shanghai. Since 2016 he is Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center, sponsored by Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

Wilczek has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow (1975 to 1977) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (1982 to 1987). He has received UNESCO's Dirac Medal, the Lorentz Medal (Netherlands Academy of Sciences), the American Physical Society's Sakurai and Lilienfeld Prizes, and several others. In 2004 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, and in 2005 the King Faisal Prize. In 2022 he was honored with the Templeton Prize. In 2022 Wilczek gave the initial Steven Weinberg Memorial lecture at the University of Texas, Austin. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the U.S., the Netherlandish, the Swedish, and the Chinese Academies of Sciences, among others.

In 2015 he co-founded the Quantum Connections international summer school near Stockholm, and in 2025 its sister winter school, Quantum Connections in Sanya, China. Since 2018 the Jagiellonian University (Krakow) has awarded a biannual "Wilczek Prize" for young Polish physics researchers.

From 2015 to 2023 Wilczek wrote a monthly "Wilczek's Universe" column for the Wall Street Journal, which evolved into an ongoing "Wilczek's Multiverse" series at the South China Morning Post. He has authored several well-received books for the public, published by leading commercial publishers and widely translated, notably "Longing for the Harmonies" (with Betsy Devine) (W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), "A Beautiful Question" (Penguin, 2015), and "Fundamentals" (Penguin, 2021). He is presently working on "Futures" (Penguin, expected 2027), an expansive project spanning a public lecture series and writings. Built around a "threefold way" framework of what is, what could be, and what should be, it examines how science, by defining possible futures, can inform the search for purpose. He is also editor-in-chief of "The Princeton Companion to Physics" (Princeton University Press, expected 2029).