The Frank Wilczek Prize Committee announced that the winner of the second edition of the contest is Dr Michał Parniak from the University of Warsaw. He was awarded for ‘developing new experimental platforms for quantum research and technologies and using them to demonstrate the latest quantum phenomena and protocols’.
Dr Michał Parniak has graduated in Physics from the University of Warsaw, where he has also earned his PhD. Later, he completed an internship at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen before returning to his alma mater to work at the Centre of New Technologies. He is the head of the Quantum Optical Devices laboratory. He is the author and co-author of nearly 40 frequently cited papers in journals such as Nature Communications and Nature Physics. His research interests include quantum information science and innovative technologies optical communication technologies.
The Frank Wilczek Prize was established in February 2019. The award worth 12 thousand US dollars is funded by the JU Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Computer Science and the Kościuszko Foundation. It is awarded biannually to young Polish scientists who have made a significant discovery in physics, astronomy or related fields.
The award patron Frank Wilczek is an eminent American physicist of Polish-Italian origin, a Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004, together with Hugh David Politzer and David Gross, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction. In 2012 Prof. Wilczek was conferred with an honorary doctorate of the Jagiellonian University.
