Walecka is currently the Governor's Distinguished CEBAF Professor of Physics, Emeritus at the College of William and Mary.
[2] Walecka studied at Harvard University as an undergraduate, reviving a Bachelor of Arts in 1954,[2] and received his doctorate in 1958 under Victor Weisskopf at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[4] From 1986 to 1992 he was the scientific director of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) in Newport News, Virginia.
In 2000 he edited Felix Bloch's lectures on statistical mechanics (World Scientific).
"[1][5] In 2009 he received the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal "for theoretical contributions in electroweak interactions with nuclei, the development of relativistic field theories of the nuclear many-body problem and unparalleled achievements in the education of a generation of young nuclear many-body physicists".