Stanley Wojcicki


Stanley George Wojcicki is a Polish American emeritus professor and former chair of the physics department at Stanford University in California, United States.

Early life and education

Wojcicki was born in Warsaw, Poland, the son of Janina Wanda Wójcicka, a bibliographer, and, a lawyer. He and his brother fled from Poland to Sweden with his mother at the age of 12, when communists came to power. They eventually arrived in the United States. His father remained in Poland, and was soon imprisoned for five years for being a member of the government's main opposition party. He was never able to get a visa to come to the United States.
Wojcicki and his brother were sent to a boarding school run by the Franciscan order near Buffalo, New York. He excelled in mathematics and had thought of pursuing either engineering or medicine, but decided to study physics. He attended Harvard University on a scholarship and graduated with a BA. He later attended University of California, Berkeley where he earned a PhD.

Career

Wojcicki worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and was a National Science Foundation fellow at CERN and the Collège de France. In 1966, he joined the Stanford University physics faculty where he headed the Department of Physics from 1982–85 and 2004–2007.
Wojcicki has served as an advisor to government funding agencies as well as to several high energy physics laboratories. He also headed the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, which advises the United States Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation on particle physics matters.

Personal life

Stanley Wojcicki is the husband of fellow educator Esther Wojcicki, whom he met at UC Berkeley. They have three children and nine grandchildren.
In 2010, his daughter Anne and her then-husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, endowed a $2.5 million chair in experimental physics at Stanford in her father's name.