He is also the recipient of numerous awards for his groundbreaking contributions in the field of astronomy including Prize of the Foundation for Polish Science, Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize and the Marian Smoluchowski Medal of the Polish Physical Society.

Wolszczan was born on 29 April 1946 in Szczecinek located in present-day West Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland; in the 1950s his family moved to Szczecin.

His father Jerzy Wolszczan taught economics at former Szczecin Polytechnic (currently West Pomeranian University of Technology) and his mother, Zofia, worked for the Polish Writers' Union.

His early interest in astronomy was inspired by his father who told him stories and myths connected with stellar constellations.

In 1973, as a senior assistant, he moved to Bonn for training at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

Working with Dale Frail, Wolszczan carried out astronomical observations from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico that led them to the discovery of the pulsar PSR B1257+12 in 1990.

[5] At the Arecibo Observatory, Wolszczan also collaborated with Joseph H. Taylor Jr and conducted research on millisecond pulsars.

[6] In 2012, Matthew Route and Wolszczan detected bursts of radio waves emitted from 2MASS J10475385+2124234 using Arecibo Observatory.

At Pennsylvania State University, Wolszczan held the Evan Pugh Professorship of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

[13] In 2008 Gazeta Prawna disclosed that from 1973 until 1981 Wolszczan was an informant (codenamed "Lange") for the Polish communist-era Służba Bezpieczeństwa.