Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Science and Higher Education Jarosław Gowin appointed on 4 March 2019 Prof. Zbigniew Błocki for the position of director of the National Science Center (NCN). Professor Błocki was earlier elected in a competition conducted by the NCN Council and presented to the minister to confirm the election.

Professor Błocki has been an employee of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Jagiellonian University since 1990, where he was awarded with his PhD title in 1995. In 1999, he received Fulbright scholarship at the Indiana University in Bloomington and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He worked at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, and in 2002 he spent three months at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. In 2006 and 2013 he was a visiting professor at Indiana University.

In 2010-2015 he was a member of the NCN Council, and in the years 2010-2013 he was a member of the Main Board of the Polish Mathematical Society.