[3][4] His paternal grandfather Henry Nelson Wieman was a religious philosopher of German descent and his mother had white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family background.

In 2001, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Eric Allin Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle, for fundamental studies of the Bose-Einstein condensate.

[11] On 1 September 2013, Wieman joined Stanford University with a joint appointment in the physics department and the Graduate School of Education.

He has used and promotes Eric Mazur's peer instruction, a pedagogical system where teachers repeatedly ask multiple-choice concept questions during class, and students reply on the spot with little wireless "clicker" devices.

Wieman is the founder and chairman of PhET, a web-based directive of University of Colorado Boulder which provides an extensive suite of simulations to improve the way that physics, chemistry, biology, earth science and math are taught and learned.