| Stanley Wojcicki | |
| Birth Name: | Stanisław Jerzy Wójcicki |
| Birth Date: | 30 March 1937 |
| Birth Place: | Warsaw, Second Polish Republic |
| Death Place: | Los Altos, California, U.S. |
| Workplaces: | Stanford |
| Education: | Harvard University (BA) University of California, Berkeley (MA, PhD) |
| Thesis Title: | Pion-Hyperon Resonances |
| Thesis Url: | http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b18265619~S1 |
| Thesis Year: | 1962 |
| Prizes: | Bruno Pontecorvo Prize (2011) Panofsky Prize (2015) |
| Spouse: | Esther Hochman |
| Children: | 3, including Susan and Anne |
| Mother: | Janina Wójcicka Hoskins |
| Father: | Franciszek Wójcicki |
Stanley George Wojcicki[1] (; born Stanisław Jerzy Wójcicki, pronounced as /pl/; March 30, 1937 – May 31, 2023)[2] was a Polish-American physicist and former chair of the physics department at Stanford University in California.[3]
Wojcicki was born in Warsaw, Poland, the son of Janina Wanda Wójcicka (née Kozłowska), a bibliographer, and Franciszek Wójcicki, a lawyer.[1] [4] He and his brother fled from Poland to Sweden with his mother at the age of 12, when communists came to power.[5] 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 gain a visa to come to the United States.[5]
Wojcicki and his brother were sent to a boarding school run by the Franciscan Order near Buffalo, New York.[5] 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 the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a PhD.[6]
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 1982–1985 and 2004–2007.
Wojcicki served as an advisor to government funding agencies (US and foreign) 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.
Wojcicki led the HEPAP subpanel New Facilities for the US High-Energy Physics Program which recommended building the Super Conducting Super Collilder in 1983.[7] [8]
Stanley Wojcicki was the husband of fellow educator Esther Wojcicki, whom he met at UC Berkeley. They had three children and ten grandchildren.[9]
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.
Wojcicki was a Catholic.[12]
Wojcicki died at his residence in Los Altos, California, on May 31, 2023, at the age of 86.[13]