Sam Wang is a professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton University. He is also a faculty associate of the Program in Law and Public Affairs. An alumnus of the California Institute of Technology, where he received a B.S. with honor in physics, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1993. He conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University Medical Center and then at Bell Labs Lucent Technologies. In the mid-1990s, he also worked on science and education policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. Sam Wang joined the Princeton University faculty in 2000.
He is noted for his application of data analytics to American politics. He pioneered statistical methods to analyze U.S. presidential election polls in the aggregate, starting in 2004 at the Princeton Election Consortium (election.princeton.edu). He is now applying these methods to help define and limit partisan gerrymandering (gerrymander.princeton.edu). His work on gerrymandering has been published in the Stanford Law Review, the Election Law Journal, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.
Sam Wang is also the author of two popular books. His first book, Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life, published in 2008, was named Young Adult Science Book of the Year by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2011, he published Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College. The two books are available in over 20 languages.
Recently the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Benisek v. Lamone, the second partisan-gerrymandering case this term (Gill v. Whiftord was the first). Clearly the Court intends to act. But the Justices also seem to have run aground on some fairly central questions: settling on a legal theory and a manageable standard to define the…
