He is critical of string theory on the grounds that it lacks testable predictions and is promoted with public money despite its failures so far, and has authored both scientific papers and popular polemics on this topic. His father was born in Riga and became exiled with his own parents at the beginning of the Soviet occupation of Latvia. He now holds a permanent position in the mathematics department, as senior lecturer and as departmental computer administrator. He spent four years as an assistant professor at Columbia. He obtained his PhD in particle physics from Princeton University in 1985, followed by postdoctoral work in theoretical physics at State University of New York at Stony Brook and mathematics at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley.
Woit graduated in 1979 from Harvard University with bachelor's and master's degrees in physics.