Polish scholars have been present in American science since the 19th century. Born in Strzelno, Albert Michelson measured the speed of light and was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in the sciences. Mathematicians from Lviv and Warsaw established strong scientific centers in Berkeley, Chicago, and New York in the 1940s and 1950s. Polish doctors developed vaccines against polio, while engineers built bridges, helicopters, and lunar rovers. To this day, children and grandchildren of Polish immigrants continue to win Nobel Prizes, and scientists from Poland work at the best American universities.
Our list includes only individuals whose Polish heritage is documented: in Nobel biographies, encyclopedias, university memoirs, or official data. For each person, we provide their identity, the source of their Polish roots, their achievements in the USA, and links to Wikipedia, as well as to NobelPrize.org or the MacTutor archive for Nobel laureates and mathematicians.
- Albert Michelson, born in Strzelno in Kuyavia, was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in the sciences in 1907.
- Several American Nobel laureates have Polish roots, from Isidor Rabi from Rymanów to the 2024 laureates, John Hopfield and Victor Ambros.
- Stanisław Ulam from Lviv co-developed the Monte Carlo method at Los Alamos, while Alfred Tarski from Warsaw established a global center for logic in Berkeley.
- Hilary Koprowski and Albert Sabin, born in Warsaw and Białystok, developed live vaccines against polio.
- Aleksander Wolszczan announced the discovery of the first confirmed planets outside the Solar System in 1992, and Wojciech Zaremba co-founded OpenAI.
Nobel Laureates
Most of them were born in Polish territories or in families of Polish immigrants, and they received the Nobel Prize for work done in American laboratories and universities.
Albert Michelson
Physicist, first American Nobel laureate in the sciences (1852–1931).
He was born on December 19, 1852, in Strzelno, then in Prussian partition, and two years later, his family emigrated to the USA. He taught at the Naval Academy, Case School of Applied Science, and Clark University, and from 1892 he headed the physics department at the new University of Chicago. He built an interferometer, with which he and Edward Morley demonstrated that the speed of light does not depend on the direction of its travel, and in 1920, together with Francis Pease, he was the first to measure the diameter of the star Betelgeuse. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1907, and a plaque commemorates him in Strzelno's market square.
Isidor Isaac Rabi
Physicist, Nobel laureate in Physics 1944 (1898–1988).
He was born on July 29, 1898, in Rymanów in Galicia, in a Jewish family, and as an infant in 1899, he came with his family to New York. He studied at Cornell University and Columbia University, with which he was associated throughout his professional life. He developed a resonance method for measuring the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1944, and during the war, he worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory on radar. He also co-founded Brookhaven National Laboratory.
George Wald
Biologist and biochemist, Nobel laureate in Medicine 1967 (1906–1997).
He was born on November 18, 1906, in New York as the son of immigrants. His father Isaac came from a village near Przemyśl in then Galicia, and his mother was from Bavaria. He worked for most of his career at Harvard University, where he studied the chemical processes of vision and the role of vitamin A in the retina. In 1967, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for these discoveries.
Julius Axelrod
Biochemist and pharmacologist, Nobel laureate in Medicine 1970 (1912–2004).
He was born on May 30, 1912, in New York, and his parents Isadore and Molly came to the USA from Polish Galicia and met on the Lower East Side. For decades, he worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where he headed the pharmacology section at the National Institute of Mental Health. He discovered that the action of norepinephrine at the synapse ends with its reuptake by the nerve ending. For his research on neurotransmitters, he received the Nobel Prize in 1970.
Arno Penzias
Physicist and radio astronomer, Nobel laureate in Physics 1978 (1933–2024).
He was born on April 26, 1933, in Munich to a Jewish family whose ancestors came to Germany from Poland. In 1938, the Germans attempted to deport his family to Poland along with other Jews of Polish descent, and in 1939, Arno and his brother ended up in England and then with their parents in the USA. He worked for 37 years at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he and Robert Wilson discovered cosmic microwave background radiation, the “echo” of the Big Bang. He received the Nobel Prize for this in 1978.
Andrzej Schally
Endocrinologist, Nobel laureate in Medicine 1977 (1926–2024).
He was born on November 30, 1926, in Vilnius, then in Poland, and his father was a professional officer. Through Romania, Great Britain, and Canada, he arrived in 1957 at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and from 1962 he headed a laboratory at the veterans' hospital in New Orleans and was a professor at Tulane University. Together with his team, he established the structure of hypothalamic hormones, including TRH and LH-RH, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1977. Later, he worked in Miami at the University of Miami and the veterans' hospital, where he conducted research almost until his death in 2024.
Roald Hoffmann
Theoretical chemist, Nobel laureate in Chemistry 1981 (b. 1937).
He was born on July 18, 1937, in Złoczów, then in Poland, now in Ukraine, in a Jewish family as Roald Safran. He survived the Holocaust hiding with his mother in the attic of a rural school; his father was killed by the Germans in 1943, and after the war, he attended school in Kraków. In 1949, he arrived in the USA, studied at Columbia University and Harvard, and has been associated with Cornell University since 1965. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981 for his theory of chemical reaction pathways.
Martin Perl
Particle physicist, Nobel laureate in Physics 1995 (1927–2014).
He was born on June 24, 1927, in New York. As he wrote in his Nobel autobiography, his parents came to the USA as children around 1900 from the “Polish part of Russia.” He worked at Stanford University, where at the SLAC center he discovered the tau lepton, a new elementary particle. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for this discovery.
Frank Wilczek
Theoretical physicist, Nobel laureate in Physics 2004 (b. 1951).
He was born on May 15, 1951, in Mineola on Long Island near New York, and grew up in Glen Oaks in Queens. In his Nobel autobiography, he writes that his paternal grandparents came to the USA from Poland after World War I, and his grandfather was a blacksmith. He studied at the University of Chicago and Princeton, and in 2004 he received the Nobel Prize as a professor at MIT for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of strong interactions. The Wilczek Prize, awarded in Poland to young physicists, is named after him.
Leonid Hurwicz
Economist, Nobel laureate in Economics 2007 (1917–2008).
He was born on August 21, 1917, in Moscow, but in 1919, the family returned to Warsaw, the hometown of his father, and his mother was also Polish. He graduated in law from the University of Warsaw in 1938, and the outbreak of war found him in Switzerland, from where he reached the USA through Spain and Portugal. From 1951, he worked at the University of Minnesota, where he laid the foundations of mechanism design theory. He received the Nobel Prize in 2007 at the age of 90, making him one of the oldest laureates in history.
Robert Lefkowitz
Physician and biochemist, Nobel laureate in Chemistry 2012 (b. 1943).
He was born on April 15, 1943, in New York and grew up in the Bronx. His paternal grandparents came from southern Poland, his grandmother from Częstochowa, and his grandfather from a nearby town. After studying medicine at Columbia University, he worked at NIH, and since 1973 he has been associated with Duke University. In 2012, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on G protein-coupled receptors.
John Hopfield
Physicist, Nobel laureate in Physics 2024 (b. 1933).
He was born on July 15, 1933, in Chicago to a family of physicists. His father, also John Joseph Hopfield, was born in Płock as Jan Józef Chmielewski and became a well-known spectroscopist after moving to the USA. The son worked at Bell Labs, Princeton University, and Caltech, where in 1982 he described a neural network named after him. In 2024, he received the Nobel Prize along with Geoffrey Hinton for discoveries that enabled machine learning.
Victor Ambros
Molecular biologist, Nobel laureate in Medicine 2024 (b. 1953).
He was born on December 1, 1953, in Hanover, New Hampshire. His father Longin was born in 1923 in Dordziszki in then Polish territories, attended school in Vilnius, was deported to Germany for forced labor during the war, and emigrated to the USA in 1946. Victor studied at MIT, worked at Harvard and Dartmouth, and is currently a professor at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester. In 2024, he received the Nobel Prize along with Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA, and in September 2026, the Mazovian governor confirmed that he is a Polish citizen by birth, which Prime Minister Donald Tusk personally informed him about.
Two Nobel laureates from German families were also born in today's Polish territories, who emigrated to America in the 1930s. Otto Stern was born in 1888 in Żory in Upper Silesia, in a Jewish family, and from 1933 was a professor at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1943 for measuring the magnetic moment of the proton. Maria Goeppert Mayer was born in 1906 in Katowice, grew up in Göttingen, and in 1930 emigrated to the USA with her husband. She received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for the shell model of the atomic nucleus.
Stern: Wikipedia · NobelPrize.org
Goeppert Mayer: Wikipedia · NobelPrize.org
Mathematics and Statistics
Many Polish mathematicians from the Lviv and Warsaw schools emigrated to the USA before or during the war. They established centers that are still among the most important in the world today.
Stanisław Ulam
Mathematician from the Lviv school, co-creator of the Monte Carlo method (1909–1984).
He was born on April 13, 1909, in Lviv and was part of the famous Lviv mathematical school. In 1936, he moved to the USA at the invitation of John von Neumann, worked at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin, and in 1943 joined the laboratory at Los Alamos, where he remained until 1965. There, he developed the Monte Carlo method, published jointly with Nicholas Metropolis in 1949, and together with Edward Teller created the concept of the hydrogen bomb known as the Teller–Ulam configuration. He obtained American citizenship in the early 1940s and spent his last years as a professor at the University of Colorado.
Alfred Tarski
Logician and mathematician from Warsaw, professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1901–1983).
He was born on January 14, 1901, in Warsaw as Alfred Teitelbaum, changing his surname to Tarski around 1923. Together with Stefan Banach, he announced the famous Banach–Tarski paradox in 1924, and in 1933 published a groundbreaking paper on the concept of truth in formalized languages. In August 1939, he attended a conference at Harvard and remained in the USA after the outbreak of the war. From 1942, he worked at the University of California, Berkeley, where he built one of the world's most important centers for logic and model theory.
Antoni Zygmund
Mathematician from Warsaw, founder of the Chicago school of analysis (1900–1992).
He was born on December 25, 1900, in Warsaw, obtained his doctorate from the University of Warsaw in 1923, and from 1930 headed the mathematics department at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius. In 1940, he emigrated to the USA and taught successively at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Pennsylvania. From 1947 to 1980, he was a professor at the University of Chicago, where he, along with his student Albert Calderón, developed the theory of singular integrals, known as the Calderón–Zygmund theory. In 1986, he received the American National Medal of Science.
Samuel Eilenberg
Mathematician from Warsaw, co-creator of category theory, professor at Columbia University (1913–1998).
He was born on September 30, 1913, in Warsaw, and obtained his doctorate from the University of Warsaw in 1936 under the supervision of Karol Borsuk. From 1940, he worked in the USA, first at the University of Michigan, later at Indiana University, and from 1947 until the end of his career at Columbia University in New York. In 1945, together with Saunders Mac Lane, he introduced the concepts of "category" and "natural transformation," laying the foundation for category theory. In 1986, he received the Wolf Prize.
Marek Kac
Mathematician from the Lviv school, specialist in probability theory (1914–1984).
He was born in 1914 in Krzemieniec (then part of the Russian Empire, interwar Poland, now Ukraine), and studied at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv under Hugo Steinhaus, where he defended his doctorate in 1937. In 1938, he went on a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, and from 1939 to 1961 worked at Cornell University. He then spent about twenty years as a professor at the Rockefeller University in New York, and ended his career at the University of Southern California. His name is associated with the Feynman–Kac formula, and his 1966 paper "Can One Hear the Shape of a Drum?" became a classic in mathematics.
Witold Hurewicz
Mathematician from Łódź, topologist, professor at MIT (1904–1956).
He was born on June 29, 1904, in Łódź, where he graduated from high school in 1921 and then studied in Vienna. He arrived in the USA in 1936 as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taught at the University of North Carolina, and from 1945 until his death was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He discovered higher homotopy groups and exact sequences, and his book "Dimension Theory" from 1941, co-authored with Henry Wallman, became a standard textbook. He died in 1956 after falling from a pyramid in Mexico during a scientific conference.
Jerzy Neyman
Statistician, founder of the statistics department at the University of California, Berkeley (1894–1981).
He was born on April 16, 1894, in Bender in Bessarabia, in a family that, according to MacTutor, considered itself Polish and spoke Polish. In 1921, he came to Poland, defended his doctorate at the University of Warsaw in 1924, and established a biometry laboratory at the Nencki Institute. In 1938, he moved to Berkeley, where he created a statistical laboratory, and in 1955 a standalone statistics department. Together with Egon Pearson, he built the theory of hypothesis testing and introduced confidence intervals, and in 1968 he received the National Medal of Science.
Jacob Wolfowitz
Statistician born in Warsaw, professor at Cornell University (1910–1981).
He was born on March 19, 1910, in Warsaw, and in 1920, as a ten-year-old, joined his father, who had emigrated to the USA in 1914. He graduated from City College in New York and defended his doctorate at New York University in 1942. He worked at Columbia University, and from 1951 was a professor at Cornell University, later at the University of Illinois. With Abraham Wald, he proved the optimality of the sequential likelihood ratio test, first used the term "nonparametric" in a 1942 paper, and his book on coding theorems is a classic in information theory.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Mathematician born in Warsaw, father of fractal geometry (1924–2010).
He was born on November 20, 1924, in Warsaw, and in 1936 his family moved to France. In 1958, he permanently relocated to the USA and worked for decades at the IBM research center in Yorktown Heights, where he became an IBM Fellow. From 1987, he taught at Yale University, where he was Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences. His book "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" published in 1982 popularized fractals worldwide, and in 1993 he received the Wolf Prize in Physics.
Henryk Iwaniec
Mathematician from Elbląg, specialist in number theory, professor at Rutgers University (b. 1947).
He was born on October 9, 1947, in Elbląg, studied at the University of Warsaw, where he defended his doctorate in 1972, and then worked at the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1983, he moved to the USA, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and since January 1987 has been a professor in New Jersey at Rutgers University. Together with John Friedlander, he proved in 1997 that there are infinitely many prime numbers of the form a² + b⁴. He received, among others, the Cole Prize in 2002 and the Shaw Prize in 2015, and in 2006 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Paul Baran
Engineer born in Grodno, co-creator of the packet switching idea (1926–2011).
He was born on April 29, 1926, in Grodno, which was then part of Poland and is now in Belarus. As a two-year-old, he emigrated with his family to Philadelphia, graduated from Drexel University in 1949, and earned a master's degree at UCLA in 1959. From 1959 to 1968, he worked at RAND Corporation, where in the early 1960s he developed the concept of a network that divides data into separate blocks transmitted independently, known as packet switching. This idea became one of the foundations of the ARPANET and the Internet, and Baran received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for 2007, awarded to him in 2008.
Wojciech Zaremba
Computer scientist from Kluczbork, co-founder of OpenAI (b. 1988).
He was born on November 30, 1988, in Kluczbork, studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Warsaw and at École Polytechnique near Paris. He defended his PhD in deep learning in 2016 at New York University, and during his studies worked at Google Brain and Facebook's artificial intelligence lab. In 2015, he was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in San Francisco. He led the robotics team there, and since 2020 has led teams developing Codex, GitHub Copilot, and the GPT models on which ChatGPT is based.
Jakub Pachocki
Computer scientist, chief scientist at OpenAI.
He graduated in computer science from the University of Warsaw and defended his PhD in theoretical computer science in 2016 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In 2017, he joined OpenAI, where he led the deep learning team, and as research director, he led work on the GPT-4 model. In May 2024, he became the chief scientist at OpenAI, succeeding Ilya Sutskever.
Physics and Astronomy
Leopold Infeld
Theoretical physicist from Kraków, collaborator of Albert Einstein in Princeton (1898–1968).
He was born on August 20, 1898, in Kraków, in Kazimierz. From 1936 to 1938, he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he collaborated with Albert Einstein on the theory of motion in general relativity. Together they wrote the popular book "The Evolution of Physics," published in 1938 (in Polish, "Ewolucja fizyki"). In 1938, he moved to the University of Toronto, and in 1950 returned to Poland and settled in Warsaw.
Roman Smoluchowski
Physicist from Zakopane, solid-state specialist and planetologist, professor at Princeton (1910–1996).
He was born on August 31, 1910, in Zakopane as the son of physicist Marian Smoluchowski, and graduated in physics from the University of Warsaw in 1933. After the outbreak of the war, he fled Poland and from 1941 worked at the General Electric laboratory in Schenectady, obtaining US citizenship in 1944. He was a professor at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, and from 1960 to 1978 was a professor at Princeton University and the first director of the solid-state physics and materials science program. He spent his last years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied the interior of Jupiter and the planet's rings.
Wojciech Żurek
Theoretical physicist from Bielsko-Biała, researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory (b. 1951).
He was born in 1951 in Bielsko-Biała, and in 1974 graduated in technical nuclear physics from AGH in Kraków. He defended his doctorate in 1979 at the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked with John Wheeler, and then was a fellow at Caltech. Since 1984, he has been associated with Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he led a theoretical astrophysics group. He is one of the creators of the theory of decoherence and "quantum Darwinism," and in 2024 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
Bohdan Paczyński
Astrophysicist from Vilnius and Warsaw, professor at Princeton University, pioneer of microlensing (1940–2007).
He was born on February 8, 1940, in Vilnius, and from 1949 lived in Warsaw, where he studied at the University of Warsaw and defended his doctorate in astronomy in 1964. In 1982, he joined the faculty of Princeton University, and in 1989 became the first Lyman Spitzer Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics. In 1986, he published a groundbreaking paper on gravitational microlensing, which initiated the OGLE project conducted jointly by Warsaw, Princeton, and Carnegie. He was one of the first to claim that gamma-ray bursts originate outside our Galaxy, a claim later confirmed by observations.
Aleksander Wolszczan
Radio astronomer from Szczecinek, discoverer of the first planets outside the Solar System, professor at Penn State (b. 1946).
He was born on April 29, 1946, in Szczecinek, and completed his studies and doctorate at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. He worked at Cornell and Princeton, and then became associated with Pennsylvania State University, where in 1998 he received the university's highest title, Evan Pugh Professor. Using the Arecibo radio telescope, he detected planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12, announcing the discovery together with Dale Frail in "Nature" in January 1992. These were the first confirmed planets outside the Solar System.
Medicine and Biology
Kazimierz Funk
Biochemist from Warsaw, creator of the term "vitamin" (1884–1967).
He was born in 1884 in Warsaw. In 1912, in his work "Vitamines," he introduced the concept of vitamins into science and described diseases resulting from their deficiency. He arrived in the United States in 1915, became a U.S. citizen in 1920, and worked at Columbia University among others. In 1923, he returned to Poland and headed the biochemistry department at the National Institute of Hygiene, later working in Paris, and in 1939 he moved back to the USA, where he conducted research on cancer and vitamins until his death in 1967.
Albert Sabin
Virologist from Białystok, creator of the oral polio vaccine (1906–1993).
He was born on August 26, 1906, in Białystok as Abram Saperstein. As a teenager, he emigrated with his family to the United States in the early 1920s. From 1939, he worked in Cincinnati, at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and the Children's Hospital Research Foundation, where he developed the live oral polio vaccine. The vaccine was made available in the USA in the early 1960s and became the foundation of the global fight against poliomyelitis.
Hilary Koprowski
Virologist and immunologist from Warsaw, creator of the first live polio vaccine (1916–2013).
He was born on December 5, 1916, in Warsaw, where he completed his medical studies while also studying music. After the outbreak of the war, he reached the USA via Brazil in 1944 and worked at Lederle Laboratories. On February 27, 1950, he administered his developed live oral polio vaccine to a child, the first in history. From 1957 to 1991, he directed the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, which under his leadership also developed a more effective rabies vaccine for humans.
Irena Koprowska
Cytopathologist from Warsaw, pioneer of cytological diagnostics in the USA (1917–2012).
She was born as Irena Grasberg in 1917 in Warsaw and obtained her medical degree from the University of Warsaw in December 1939. She arrived in the USA in 1944 with her husband, Hilary Koprowski. At Cornell University Medical College, she was a close collaborator of George Papanicolaou, the founder of cytology, later directing cytopathology laboratories at Hahnemann Medical College, where she became the first female full professor, and at Temple University Hospital (1970–1987). In 1985, she received the Papanicolaou Award from the American Society of Cytopathology.
Ludwik Gross
Physician and virologist from Kraków, discoverer of the leukemia virus in mice (1904–1999).
He was born on September 11, 1904, in Kraków and obtained his medical degree from Jagiellonian University in 1929. After the outbreak of World War II, he reached the USA in 1940 via Romania and France, where he served as a physician in the U.S. Army. At the Bronx Veterans Hospital, he led cancer research and in 1951 was the first to demonstrate that leukemia in mammals is transmitted by a virus; he also discovered the polyoma virus. In 1974, he received the Lasker Award.
Maria Zakrzewska
Physician born in Berlin, daughter of a Polish noble family, founder of a hospital for women in Boston (1829–1902).
She was born in 1829 in Berlin. According to a biography from the American National Library of Medicine, her father, Ludwig Martin Zakrzewski, was an official "from a Polish noble family." In 1853, she emigrated to New York, obtained her medical degree from Western Reserve College in Cleveland in 1856, and in 1862 founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, one of the first hospitals in the USA run by female physicians.
Wacław Szybalski
Geneticist from Lviv, professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, pioneer of gene transfer (1921–2020).
He was born on September 9, 1921, in Lviv, which was Polish at the time. In 1960, he joined the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he became a professor of oncology in 1963. Together with his wife Elizabeth, he was one of the first to transfer genes into mammalian cells (using HAT medium) and proposed treating genetic diseases with gene therapy. He founded the journal "Gene" and in 2011 was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta.
Zbigniew Darżynkiewicz
Physician and cell biologist, pioneer of flow cytometry (1936–2021).
He was born in 1936 in Dziśna (then part of the Wilno Voivodeship) and completed his medical studies in Warsaw. He arrived in the USA in 1969, working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell University, and from 1990 at New York Medical College, where he directed the Brander Cancer Research Institute. He was a world pioneer in flow cytometry and the author of over 780 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He was a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the Kazimierz Funk Award from PIASA (2014).
Chemistry
Kazimierz Fajans
Physical chemist from Warsaw, co-discoverer of the radioactive displacement law (1887–1975).
He was born on May 27, 1887, in Warsaw and completed his secondary education there, studying in Germany for his higher education. In February 1913, he announced the radioactive displacement law, independently of Frederick Soddy, now known as the Fajans-Soddy law. After Hitler came to power, he left Munich and from 1936 to 1957 was a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His name is also associated with Fajans' rules and adsorption indicators used in analytical chemistry.
Wojciech Świętosławski
Polish physical chemist, "father of thermochemistry," scientist in Pittsburgh during the war (1881–1968).
He was born on June 21, 1881, in Kiryjówka in Podolia, was a professor at the Warsaw University of Technology, and until 1939 served as the Minister of Public Education. After the outbreak of the war, he moved to the USA, in 1940 was a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and from 1941 was a research fellow at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research in Pittsburgh. There, he developed ebulliometry, his method for precise boiling point measurements, and after the war returned to Poland.
Leo Sternbach
Chemist and pharmacist, graduate of Jagiellonian University, creator of Librium and Valium (1908–2005).
He was born on May 7, 1908, in Opatija (now Croatia) to a pharmacist family from Galicia, Michał Abraham Sternbach. In 1926, he moved to Kraków, where he graduated in pharmacy from Jagiellonian University and obtained a doctorate in chemistry. From 1941, he worked for Hoffmann-La Roche in Nutley, New Jersey, where he discovered benzodiazepines, including diazepam, which was released to the market as Valium in 1963. Valium was the most prescribed medication in the USA from 1969 to 1982.
Stephanie Kwolek
American chemist, daughter of Polish immigrants, inventor of Kevlar (1923–2014).
She was born in 1923 in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, as the daughter of Polish immigrants. After completing her chemistry degree at Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1946, she began working at DuPont, where she spent about 40 years. In 1965, while researching liquid crystal polymers, she discovered the fiber that became Kevlar, used in bulletproof vests among other applications. She received the National Medal of Technology (1996) and the Perkins Medal (1997), among others.
Krzysztof Matyjaszewski
Polymer chemist from Konstantynów, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, creator of the ATRP method (b. 1950).
He was born in 1950 in Konstantynów and obtained his doctorate from the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1976. Since 1985, he has been working at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he is a professor (J.C. Warner University Professor of Natural Sciences). In 1994, he discovered atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP), one of the most important methods for producing modern plastics. He is a laureate of the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2011) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Engineers and Inventors
Ralph Modjeski (Rudolf Modrzejewski)
Engineer, bridge builder (1861–1940).
He was born on January 27, 1861, as the son of the famous actress Helena Modrzejewska. Most sources cite Bochnia as his birthplace, but a biography published by the National Academy of Sciences indicates Kraków. He arrived in America with his mother in 1876, became a U.S. citizen in 1883, and graduated first in his class from the École des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris in 1885. He designed or co-designed many great bridges, including the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, the Huey P. Long Bridge in New Orleans, and oversaw the engineering consultant board for the reconstruction of the Quebec Bridge.
Tadeusz Sendzimir
Metallurgical engineer and inventor of rolling mills (1894–1989).
He was born in 1894 in Lviv and studied at the Lviv Polytechnic, which he did not complete due to the outbreak of World War I. His first inventions were implemented in Poland, where in 1932 a rolling mill based on his idea was launched in Nowy Bytom. During World War II, he lived in Middletown, Ohio, moved to Waterbury, Connecticut in the 1940s, and later founded T. Sendzimir Inc., which is still in operation today. He became a U.S. citizen in 1946, and after 1990, a steel mill in Kraków-Nowa Huta was named after him.
Mieczysław G. Bekker
Off-road vehicle engineer, co-creator of the lunar rover (1905–1989).
He was born on May 25, 1905, in Strzyżów in Lublin Voivodeship and graduated from the Warsaw University of Technology in 1929. After September 1939, he reached France via Romania, and then to Canada, from where he moved to the United States in 1956 and worked for the U.S. Army laboratories and as an academic lecturer. At General Motors in Santa Barbara, he led the work on lunar vehicles, and his concept became the basis for the Lunar Roving Vehicle, which astronauts drove during the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions. He is considered one of the founders of terramechanics, the science of vehicle movement over ground.
Frank Piasecki
American helicopter designer, son of Polish immigrants (1919–2008).
He was born in 1919 in Philadelphia as the son of Nikodem and Emilia Piasecki, immigrants from Poland. His father was a tailor. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, and in 1943 he piloted his PV-2 helicopter, the second successful helicopter built in the USA. He developed a tandem rotor system ("flying banana"), which led to the CH-46 Sea Knight and CH-47 Chinook, and received the American National Medal of Technology.
Kazimierz Żegleń
Resurrectionist priest and inventor of the silk bulletproof vest (b. 1869).
He was born in 1869 in Galicia and as a young man joined the Resurrectionist order. He went to America and worked in Chicago, where after the assassination of Mayor Carter Harrison in 1893, he began working on a lightweight vest made of layers of silk. In March 1897 in Chicago, he allowed himself to be shot with a revolver during a public demonstration, and the vest stopped the bullet. Later, he collaborated with Jan Szczepanik and founded the Zeglen Tire Co. in the USA.
Józef Tykociński-Tykociner
Electrical engineer, pioneer of sound film (1877–1969).
He was born in Włocławek, in the Russian partition, according to most sources in 1877. In 1921, he became the first research professor of engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. As early as June 1922, he publicly demonstrated a film with optically recorded sound there, several years before the commercial success of "talkies." Due to university policies and industry indifference, he did not develop his patents, worked at the university until his retirement in 1946, and then wrote about "zetetics," a method of organizing scientific research.
Henryk Magnuski
Telecommunications engineer, designer of the "walkie-talkie" radio station at Motorola (1909–1978).
He was born in 1909 in Warsaw and graduated in telecommunications from the Warsaw University of Technology in 1934. In June 1939, he moved to New York, and the outbreak of war prevented his return to Poland. From 1940, he worked at Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago, later Motorola, where he was a key designer of the SCR-300 backpack radio station, the first to be called a "walkie-talkie," used by the U.S. Army since 1943.
Social and Human Sciences
Florian Znaniecki
Sociologist and philosopher, co-author of "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America" (1882–1958).
He was born on January 15, 1882, in Świątniki near Włocławek and is considered the founder of Polish academic sociology. In 1914, he came to Chicago at the invitation of William I. Thomas, with whom he wrote the classic work "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America" about Polish peasants and emigrants. After years of work in Poznań, he returned to the USA, taught at Columbia University, and from 1942 was a professor at the University of Illinois. In 1953, he was elected president of the American Sociological Society (now the American Sociological Association).
Bronisław Malinowski
Anthropologist, creator of modern field studies (1884–1942).
He was born on April 7, 1884, in Kraków and studied at Jagiellonian University. He gained fame as a professor of social anthropology at the London School of Economics and a researcher of the Trobriand Islands. In 1939, he came to the USA and taught at Yale University as a visiting professor. In May 1942, he was one of the founders of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) in New York and delivered a speech at its inauguration, a day before his death.
Oskar Lange
Economist, professor at the University of Chicago (1904–1965).
He was born on July 27, 1904, in Tomaszów Mazowiecki and earned his doctorate at Jagiellonian University. In 1937, he came to the USA permanently, taught briefly in Michigan and California, and from July 1, 1938, worked at the University of Chicago, where he also collaborated with the Cowles Commission. His work "On the Economic Theory of Socialism" became a voice in the famous debate on the possibility of economic calculation in socialism. In 1945, he renounced his American citizenship, became the first ambassador of post-war Poland to the USA, and then returned to his country.
Richard Pipes
Historian of Russia and the USSR, professor at Harvard (1923–2018).
He was born on July 11, 1923, in Cieszyn to an assimilated Jewish family and grew up in Warsaw. In 1939, his father took the family from occupied Warsaw through Italy to the United States. He studied at Cornell, earned his doctorate at Harvard, and taught there Russian history from 1958 to 1996. From 1981 to 1982, he was an expert on the USSR and Eastern Europe in the National Security Council under President Reagan.
Zbigniew Brzeziński
Political scientist, Sovietologist, national security advisor (1928–2017).
He was born in 1928 in Warsaw to a diplomatic family and grew up in Canada, where he graduated from McGill University. In 1953, he defended his doctorate at Harvard and taught there until 1960, then for many years was a professor at Columbia University and headed its Institute for the Study of Communism. From 1977 to 1981, he was national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, and later taught at Johns Hopkins University and advised at CSIS. He was the author of several works, including the book "The Grand Chessboard."
Piotr S. Wandycz
Historian of Central and Eastern Europe, professor at Yale (1923–2017).
He was born in 1923 in Kraków and grew up in Lviv. In 1939, he reached France via Romania, and then to the United Kingdom, where he served in the Polish Army, studied at Cambridge, and defended his doctorate at the London School of Economics in 1951. After working at Indiana University, he joined Yale University in 1966, where he became the Bradford Durfee Professor of History in 1989. He wrote 18 books on the history of Poland and Central Europe.
Jan Karski
Courier of the Polish Underground State, later professor at Georgetown University (1914–2000).
He was born in 1914 in Łódź as Jan Kozielewski. During the war, he was a courier for the Polish underground and in July 1943 personally informed President Roosevelt about the extermination of the Jews. After the war, he settled permanently in the USA, where he earned his doctorate at Georgetown University and taught international relations at the School of Foreign Service for several decades. In 2012, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Feliks Gross
Sociologist and political scientist, professor at City University of New York (1906–2006).
He was born on June 17, 1906, in Kraków and taught at Jagiellonian University before the war. After the outbreak of the war, he reached the United States in 1940 via Vilnius and Japan. He taught at various institutions, including the University of Wyoming and New York University, and was a professor of sociology and anthropology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for the longest time. He was active in the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America for many years and served as its president from 1988 to 1999.
Czesław Miłosz
Poet, Nobel laureate in literature, professor at Berkeley (1911–2004).
He was born on June 30, 1911, in Szetejnie, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, and is one of the most important Polish poets of the 20th century. In 1960, he came to Berkeley at the invitation of the faculty of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of California. He was a professor of Slavic literature there until his retirement in 1978, and in 1980 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Maria Skłodowska-Curie in America
Born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, she never worked in the USA but visited the country twice. In May 1921, she came with her daughters at the invitation of journalist Marie Meloney, who raised $100,000 among American women for a gram of radium, and on May 20, 1921, President Warren Harding presented her with a symbolic golden key to the radium chest at the White House. In 1929, she visited again, met with President Herbert Hoover, and raised funds to equip the Radium Institute in Warsaw, which was directed by her sister Bronisława.
Polish-American Scientific Institutions
Polish scholars in the USA also have their own institutions. These three have been operating for decades and are open to researchers, students, and all interested parties.
Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA)
The institute was inaugurated on May 15, 1942, at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. It was founded by a group of scholars from the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences who fled before the war: Bronisław Malinowski, Oskar Halecki, Jan Kucharzewski, Wacław Lednicki, Rafał Taubenschlag, and Wojciech Świętosławski. It was meant to continue the mission of PAU in exile. Today, PIASA publishes the quarterly "The Polish Review" and books under the PIASA Books imprint, has awarded prizes to outstanding scholars since 1995, and maintains a library, archive, and gallery at its Manhattan headquarters.
Kosciuszko Foundation
The foundation was registered in 1925 in New York as a "living monument" to Tadeusz Kościuszko. Its founder was Stephen Mizwa (Szczepan Mierzwa), who previously created the Polish-American Scholarship Committee, and the first president was Henry Noble MacCracken. The foundation supports scientific and cultural exchange between Poland and the USA, awards scholarships and grants to students, scholars, and artists, organizes the Chopin Competition since 1949, and publishes an English-Polish dictionary. Its headquarters is located in the Kosciuszko Foundation House on the Upper East Side, and the foundation also has a building in Washington and an office in Warsaw.
Józef Piłsudski Institute of America
The institute was established in 1943 in New York at the initiative of former collaborators of Marshal Piłsudski and representatives of the Polish diaspora. The institute's website lists July 4, 1943, as the founding date. It collects over a million documents related to the history of 20th-century Poland, including the so-called Belweder Collection, which consists of archives taken from Warsaw in 1939, and a significant portion of the collections is digitized. It is currently located at 138 Greenpoint Avenue in Brooklyn, and its archives are open to researchers.
Several Generations of Polish Science in America
The stories from this list form a narrative of several waves. The first were immigrants from the 19th century, such as Michelson and Modjeski. The second wave consisted of scholars who fled from war and the Holocaust, from Ulam and Tarski to Koprowski and Hoffman. After them came scientists from the Polish People's Republic, such as Paczyński, Wolszczan, or Matyjaszewski, and today graduates of Polish universities work in Silicon Valley. This is complemented by the children and grandchildren of immigrants, such as Stephanie Kwolek, Frank Piasecki, or Frank Wilczek. More similar stories can be found in guides about Polish roots in Hollywood, about Polish athletes in the USA, and about Polish musicians in the USA.
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