Dr. Frank Wilczek is a third generation American of Polish descent who was born in Mineola, New York in 1951. He was educated in the public schools of Queens, attending Martin Van Buren High School. As a student and than as a professor he continued research at Princeston University includes high energy physics, quantum field theory and cosmological studies of matter and anti-matter. He married Betsy Devine on July 3, 1973; they have two children, Amity and Mira.

Professor 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. During the period 1981–88, 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, where he was the J.R. Oppenheimer Professor, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics. Since 2002, he has been an Adjunct Professor in the Centro de Estudios Científicos of Valdivia, Chile.

Dr. Frank Wilczek is the second person of Polish origin who received a Nobel prize in Physics. The first person was Maria Sklodowska Curie. He won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for a "colorful" discovery in the world of quarks, the building blocks of the atomic nucleus.

"Thanks to their discovery, David Gross, David Politzer and Frank Wilczek have brought physics one step closer to fulfilling a grand dream, to formulate a unified theory comprising gravity as well -- a theory for everything," the Academy said in announcing the prize.

The same year he was elected member of the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America. Dr. Wilczek is also a co-recipient of the 2005 King Faisal International Prize for Science. Among his other awards, Wilczek received the 2003 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize from the European Physical Society; 2002 Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for his contributions to the development of theoretical physics. He has received UNESCO's Dirac Medal, the American Physical Society's Sakurai Prize and the Michelson Prize from Case Western University.

Wilczek also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and is a Trustee of the University of Chicago. Dr. Frank Wilczek contributes regularly to Physics Today and Nature. He is known for his ability to communicate with a wide range of audiences. Much in demand for public lectures, he has been anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Light Verse and twice in Best American Science Writing (2003, 2005). Together with his wife Betsy Devine, Wilczek wrote book, Longing for the Harmonies.