Maciej Walczak received his undergraduate degree (maxima cum laude) from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. In 2003 he started his graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he worked on the synthesis and reactions of strained carbocycles. After graduating in 2009, he moved to New York as a Brodeur Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where he was involved in the synthesis of glycoproteins, anticancer vaccines, and antimetastatic agents. In August 2013 he started his independent career at the University of Colorado Boulder as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020.​​