Prof. Frank Wilczek
Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics,Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Prof. Wilczek received his B.S. degree from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He taught at Princeton from 1974–81. He was the Chancellor Robert Huttenback Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1981–88, and the first permanent member of the National Science Foundation's Institute for Theoretical Physics. He has received UNESCO's Dirac Medal, the American Physical Society's Sakurai Prize, the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society , the Michelson Prize from Case Western University, and the Lorentz Medal of the Netherlands Academy for his contributions to the development of theoretical physics. In 2004 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics as a graduate student for his work on asymptotic freedom (essential in understanding strong forces), and in 2005 the King Faisal Prize. Wilczek's contribution include the invention of axions, development of quantum chromodynamics and exploration of new kinds of quantum statistics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Trustee of the University of Chicago. Two of his pieces have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing (2003, 2005).