Stanley George Wojcicki

Professor of Physics Stanley Wojcicki retired in August, 2010, after 44 dedicated years at Stanford. His legacy as a scientist and educator will now continue beyond his emeritus status. At a celebratory dinner honoring his career, his daughter Anne Wojcicki, the Co-Founder of 23 and Me, a premier genetic testing service, and her husband, Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin, announced a $2.5 million gift for the creation of the first endowed chair in experimental physics at Stanford. In addition to being recognized as an outstanding faculty member, Wojcicki also excelled as a scientist and was elected a Fellow in the American Physical Society in 1971. His research focused on neutrino oscillation—the change from one flavor into another as a neutrino travels through space—and how to measure oscillation mode and parameters. Wojcicki has traveled far to reach this culminating moment of his career. He fled from Poland with his mother when he was 12 with only the clothes on his back and eventually studied at Harvard, where he earned his BA. He then chose to do graduate work at UC Berkeley, where he obtained his PhD and met and married his wife Esther. He went on to hold positions at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as an NSF Fellow at CERN and Collège de France before joining the Stanford physics faculty in 1966. He served as chair of the Department of Physics from 1982-85 and 2004-2007. During his professional career Wojcicki served in a number of advisory roles both to the US and foreign government funding agencies and to the directors of major high energy physics laboratories. For six years during 1990's he chaired the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel which is the principal advisory group to the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation on particle physics issues.