Prugovečki was born in Craiova, Romania to a Romanian[citation needed] mother, Helena (née Piatkowski), and Croatian father, Slavoljub. He completed the first four years of secondary education in Bucharest, before his family was forced to relocate to Zagreb in 1951, due to an anti-Yugoslav campaign by the communist authorities. He finished high school there and proceeded to study physics at the University of Zagreb, getting his diploma in 1959. He joined the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Institute Ruđer Bošković in Zagreb, where he worked as a research assistant until 1961.[1]
In 1961, as the best student of his generation in Zagreb, Prugovečki was sent to Princeton University, New Jersey, United States. He wrote his doctoral thesis under the direction of theoretical physicist Arthur Wightman, and earned his PhD from Princeton in 1964. In 1965, he moved to Canada, where he first spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Edmonton, Alberta, and then a year as a lecturer at the University of Alberta.[1]
