Sam Wang (neuroscientist)

Samuel "Sam" Sheng-Hung Wang (born 1967) is an 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 for 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.

Sam Wang
Born
Samuel Sheng-Hung Wang

1967 (age 52–53)
Known forPrinceton Election Consortium
Home townRiverside, California, US
Spouse(s)
Rebecca Moss
(
m. 2006)
Academic background
Alma mater
Doctoral advisorStuart H. Thompson
Other academic advisorsGeorge J. Augustine
Academic work
DisciplineBiology
Sub-disciplineNeuroscience
Notable works
  • Welcome to Your Brain (2008)
  • Welcome to Your Child's Brain (2011)

Early life

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

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 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.[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 sixty 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

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 both a 93% chance of Clinton victory in one model, and a greater than 99% chance of a Clinton victory in his Bayesian model,[18][19] as seen in Wang's election morning blog post titled "Final Projections: Clinton 323 EV, 51 Democratic Senate seats, GOP House".[20][21] There was a dispute in the forecasting world about how to interpret the pre-election polls. Wang believed that the polls were reliable and errors were unlikely to be correlated. Friendly rival Nate Silver predicted a much more chaotic election: he pointed to the comparatively large number of undecided voters in 2016 vs. 2012, and believed that errors in state-level polling would likely be correlated (e.g. if one state's true vote favored a candidate by 2 points compared to the polling estimate, it is likely that many other states will also favor the same candidate by around 2 points).[22] Clinton narrowly lost the 2016 election, and Wang said 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

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

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

gollark: Not much thought.
gollark: Which bots could also do pretty easily.
gollark: I mean, *it* just encouraged listening for pings by popular meme creators, then blindly investing 100% of your money.
gollark: The old system was bad in its own ways.
gollark: Possibly, but only because the new one is especially bad.

References
  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. Retrieved March 13, 2012.
  5. "Sam Wang: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle". 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". 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". Retrieved November 7, 2012.
  18. "Final Projections: Clinton 323 EV, 51 Democratic Senate seats, GOP House". election.Princeton.edu. 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. 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.
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