NSF GRFP > Fellow Profiles > Frank Wilczek

Frank Wilczek, 2004 Nobel Prize for Physics

At the age of 21, Frank Wilczek was a young graduate student working under professor David Gross at Princeton University. During this time, he would begin research that would lead to him sharing the Nobel Prize in Physics with another NSF GRFP fellow, H. David Politzer, in 2004. This would be only the beginning of his very distinguished career in the field of physics.

After receiving his PhD from Princeton, Dr. Wilczek went on to teach there from 1974 to 1981 and then at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After this, he began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Dr. Wilczek continues to be an active contributor to the physics community. He regularly has papers which appear in the journals Nature and Physics Today. In 1987, he co-wrote the book Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics with his wife, Besty Devine. His current research interests include applied physics, “pure” particle physics, and the quantum theory of black holes.

Wilczek’s other recent awards and honors include being named a Sloan Foundation Fellow from 1975 to 1977, receiving funding from NSF during the 1980s, the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002, the Lilienfield Prize of the American Physical Society in 2003, the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Commerative Medal from Charles University in Prague in 2003, and being named co-recipient of the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society in 2003 and co-recipient of the King Faisal International Prize for Science in 2005.

Selected works (in chronological order):

• A Chern-Simons Effective Field Theory for the Pfaffian Quantum Hall State
• High Density Quark Matter and the Renormalization of Group in QCD with two and three Flavors 
• Quark Description of Hadronic Phases
• Quantam Field Theory
• Riemann-Einstein Structure from Volume and Gauge Symmetry
• Color-Flavor Locking and Chiral Symmetry Breaking in High Density QCD. 1998.
• Continuity of Quark and Hadron Matter. 1998.
• Fermion Masses, Neutrino Oscillations, and Proton Decay in the Light of SuperKamiokande. 1998.