Sam Wang (neuroscientist)

American professor, neuroscientist, psephologist and author

Sam Wang

Born|

Samuel Sheng-Hung Wang

1967 (age 56-57)
Education| California Institute of Technology (BS)
Stanford University (MS, PhD)
Known for| Princeton Election Consortium
Princeton Gerrymandering Project
Electoral Innovation Lab
Academic background
Doctoral advisor| Stuart Thompson
Other advisors| George J. Augustine
David W. Tank
Winfried Denk
Academic work
Discipline| Biology
Sub-discipline| Neuroscience

Samuel "Sam" Sheng-Hung Wang (born 1967) is a Taiwanese-American professor, neuroscientist, psephologist and author.[1] He is known as the co-author of the books Welcome to Your Brain and Welcome to Your Child's Brain, as well as the Princeton Election Consortium psephology website.[2][3] Wang also gives talks about child brain development, autism, politics, and gerrymandering on television and radio, to academic audiences and for the general public.

## Early life[edit]

Wang was raised in Riverside, California. His parents emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in the 1960s.[4] He attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated in 1986 with a B.S. in physics with honors at the age of 19, making him the youngest member of his graduating class.[5][6] He went on to earn a PhD in neuroscience at Stanford University.

## Career[edit]

After receiving his PhD, Wang worked at Duke University with George James Augustine as a postdoctoral fellow, for the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, and as a postdoctoral member of technical staff with David Tank and Winfried Denk at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. There, he used pulsed lasers and two-photon microscopy to study brain signaling.

In 2006, Wang became an Associate Professor of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience at Princeton University; in 2015, he was promoted to Professor of Neuroscience.[7] His current research program addresses learning and plasticity in the brain, with a focus on the cerebellum, a major brain structure that processes sensory information and guides movement and cognitive/emotional processing. He has a major interest in autism, a disorder often correlated with disruption of the cerebellum's structure.[8]

Wang has published over one hundred articles on the brain in leading scientific journals and has received numerous awards. He gives public lectures on a regular basis and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the Fox News Channel.[9]

Wang has been widely honored for his scholarship and his advances in neuroscience. He has received the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Rita Allen Foundation Young Scholars Fellowship, a Distinguished Young Investigator Award from the W. M. Keck Foundation, and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. He was also selected by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as a Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow. In 2015, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie appointed him to the Governor's Council for Medical Research and the Treatment of Autism.

Wang is also a faculty associate with Princeton's Program in Law and Public Affairs.[10] In 2017, he founded the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a website that allows users to check for gerrymandering in the districts of their choice using three statistical tests: Student's t-test, the Median test, and the Monte Carlo method.[11] He also co-authored an amicus brief for Gill v. Whitford with Heather K. Gerken, Jonathan N. Katz, Gary King, and Larry Sabato in favor of partisan symmetry tests for gerrymandering.[12]

## Election predictions[edit]

In 2004, Wang was among the first to aggregate US presidential polls using probabilistic methods.[13] The method's applications included correct election-eve predictions, high-resolution tracking of the race during the campaign, and identification of targets for resource allocation. Wang's calculation missed the final result by a wide margin, as he predicted that John Kerry would defeat George W. Bush by 311–227 in the electoral college, corresponding to a 98% probability of a Kerry victory. One of his alternate models did precisely predict the actual electoral outcome: Bush 286, Kerry 252.[14]

In 2008, Wang and Andrew Ferguson founded the Princeton Election Consortium blog, which analyzes U.S. national election polling.[15][16] His statistical analysis in 2012 correctly predicted the presidential vote outcome in 49 of 50 states and the popular vote outcome of Barack Obama's 51.1% to Mitt Romney's 48.9%.[17] That year, the Princeton Election Consortium also correctly called 10 out of 10 close Senate races and came within a few seats of the final House outcome.

In 2016, PEC predicted a 93% chance of a Hillary Clinton victory in one model and a greater than 99% chance of a Clinton victory in his other model.[18][19][20][21] Wang believed that polls were reliable and that errors were unlikely to be correlated. Fellow forecaster Nate Silver instead predicted that a larger error was very possible, citing the large number of undecided voters in 2016 compared to 2012, and believed that errors in state-level polling would likely be correlated.[22] Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump by more than 60 electoral votes, with Wang stating that "In addition to the enormous polling error, I did not correctly estimate the size of the correlated error – by a factor of five."[23] In response to Trump's victory, Wang subsequently ate a cricket on CNN, fulfilling a promise that he would "eat a bug" if Trump won more than 240 electoral votes.[24][25]

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic Wang began tracking the spread of the disease and providing statistical data about the rate of its spread.[26]

## Books[edit]

Wang's first co-authored book, Welcome To Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How To Drive,[27] was a best-seller. It was named 2009 Young Adult Science Book of the Year by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been translated into more than 20 languages.[28] His second co-authored book, Welcome To Your Child's Brain: How The Mind Develops From Conception To College,[29] has been translated into 15 languages. Both books were co-authored by Sandra Aamodt.

## Personal life[edit]

Wang and his wife, a physician, live in Princeton, New Jersey.[30]

## References[edit]

1. ^ MacPherson, Kitta (March 2, 2009). "Princeton University - Brain science matters: Wang engages public through book, lectures, op-eds, website". Princeton.edu. Retrieved March 13, 2012.
2. ^ "Number crunchers were right about Obama despite what pundits said". Los Angeles Times. November 8, 2012. Retrieved November 9, 2012.
3. ^ Adam Gopnik (November 6, 2012). "Our Moneyball Election". The New Yorker. Retrieved November 9, 2012.
4. ^ "华裔王声宏获凯克基金会杰出青年医学研究奖". News.xinhuanet.com. Archived from the original on December 24, 2004. Retrieved March 13, 2012.
5. ^ "Sam Wang: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle". Amazon. Retrieved March 13, 2012.
6. ^ "Spotlights and Top Stories Archive". California Institute of Technology. March 23, 2010. Retrieved November 2, 2012.
7. ^ "Sam Wang - Audio & Video Lectures | The Great Courses速". Thegreatcourses.com. Retrieved March 13, 2012.
8. ^ "The Wang Lab at Princeton University速". synapse.princeton.edu. Retrieved November 25, 2012.
9. ^ "Sam Wang, Princeton Univ, Welcome to Your Brain". Online.itp.ucsb.edu. April 6, 2008. Retrieved March 13, 2012.
10. ^ "Samuel S.-H. Wang". Princeton University Program in Law and Public Affairs. Retrieved October 12, 2017.
11. ^ "The Princeton Gerrymandering Project". gerrymander.princeton.edu. Retrieved October 12, 2017.
12. ^ "Gill V. Whitford". Brennan Center for Justice. Retrieved October 12, 2017.
13. ^ "Meta-Analysis of State Polls". Retrieved November 25, 2012.
14. ^ "Final Prediction: Kerry 311 EV, Bush 227 EV". election.Princeton.edu. Retrieved January 6, 2018.
15. ^ "About the Princeton Election Consortium". Archived from the original on November 27, 2012. Retrieved November 4, 2012.
16. ^ "Election Forecaster Sam Wang On The Future Of Polling And Punditry". Forbes. November 7, 2012. Retrieved November 9, 2012.
17. ^ "Presidential prediction 2012 – final". Archived from the original on November 7, 2012. Retrieved November 7, 2012.
18. ^ "Final Projections: Clinton 323 EV, 51 Democratic Senate seats, GOP House". election.Princeton.edu. Archived from the original on November 9, 2016. Retrieved January 6, 2018.
19. ^ "Five Reasons Nate Silver is Wrong & Sam Wang is Right: Hillary Is 99%+ Likely to Win". DailyKos.com. Retrieved January 6, 2018.
20. ^ "Final Projections: Clinton 323 EV, 51 Democratic Senate seats, GOP House". Retrieved January 5, 2017.
21. ^ "Grading The 2016 Election Forecasts". Buzzfeed.com. Retrieved January 6, 2018.
22. ^ "Final Election Update: There's A Wide Range Of Outcomes, And Most Of Them Come Up Clinton". FiveThirtyEight.com. November 8, 2016. Retrieved January 6, 2018.
23. ^ "Looking ahead". election.Princeton.edu. Archived from the original on November 10, 2016. Retrieved January 6, 2018.
24. ^ Wang, Sam. "Why I Had to Eat a Bug on CNN". The New York Times, November 18, 2016.
25. ^ Morin, Rebecca. "Poll expert eats bug after Trump win". Politico, November 12, 2016.
26. ^ Rayasam, Renuka, The next New York, Politico nightly coronavirus special edition, March 31, 2020
27. ^ "Welcome to Your Brain". Bloomsbury USA. Retrieved September 11, 2012.
28. ^ Dreifus, Claudia (February 9, 2010). "A Neuroscientist Studying the Structure of Dog Brains". The New York Times.
29. ^ "Welcome To Your Brain". Welcome To Your Child's Brain. November 25, 2012. Retrieved November 25, 2012.
30. ^ "WEDDINGS/CELEBRATIONS - Rebecca Moss, Samuel Wang - NYTimes.com". New York Times. September 3, 2006. Retrieved March 13, 2012.

## External links[edit]

* Wang's biography on Princeton's website

Authority control databases

International|

* ISNI
* VIAF

National|

* Spain
* Germany
* Israel
* United States
* Czech Republic
* Korea

Academics|

* Google Scholar

Other|

* SNAC