Frank Wilczek

Frank Anthony Wilczek (born May 15, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist recognized for fundamental contributions to the understanding of the strong nuclear force through quantum chromodynamics (QCD). He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David J. Gross and H. David Politzer for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, a key property explaining how quarks interact at short distances, enabling the predictive power of QCD as the theory of the strong interaction.

Wilczek earned a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1970 and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University in 1974, where his doctoral work under David Gross laid the groundwork for asymptotic freedom. After postdoctoral positions, he joined the Princeton faculty from 1974 to 1981 before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he holds the Herman Feshbach Professorship of Physics. He has also held distinguished roles including professor at Stockholm University, distinguished professor at Arizona State University, and founding director of the T. D. Lee Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.