Wess was born in Oberwölz Stadt, a small town in the Austrian state of Styria.In 1957 [1]he received his Ph.D. in Vienna, where he was a student of Hans Thirring.

[2] His early work centered on effective field theories for hadrons, especially the interactions connecting pions and kaons with protons and neutrons.

His 1969 papers with Sidney Coleman, Curtis Callan, and Zumino detailed the mathematical structure of theories with spontaneously broken symmetries.

Anomalies occur when quantum effects violate classical symmetries, giving rise to physical phenomena such as the decay of a neutral pion into two photons.

Those conditions are so important that the terms are now named after them.Despite the fame of that early work, Wess will always be known for the 1974 papers in which he and Zumino constructed the first renormalizable supersymmetric quantum field theory in four dimensions and exhibited its nonrenormalization properties at one loop.