Paul Langacker, born in Chicago in 1946, somehow always knew that he wanted to enter the field of theoretical elementary particle physics. He has been fortunate in that his professional career almost exactly coincided with the development and testing of the Standard Model of particle physics. After studying at MIT and Berkeley, he did postdoctoral work at Rockefeller University and Penn. He remained at Penn for most of his professional life, teaching, carrying out research trying to connect theory and experiment in particle physics, and eventually becoming Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He retired from Penn in 2006, and is continuing his research at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University. There he enjoys interacting with young scientists and looks forward with great anticipation to physics discoveries from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In 2009 he completed an advanced text and reference book on particle physics, "The Standard Model and Beyond", for CRC Press. A second, updated and expanded, edition will be published in 2017. He also wrote "Can the Laws of Physics Be Unified?" for the Princeton University Press Frontiers in Physics series, also to be published in 2017. This is a introduction to the field for readers with an undergraduate-level background in physics.
Since 1983 he has been married to Irmgard Langacker. They enjoy travel, classical music and opera, and visiting with their grandchildren.