Education
He attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated in 1986 with a Bachelor of Surgery in physics with honors at the age of 19, making him the youngest member of his graduating class. He went on to earn a Doctor of Philosophy in neuroscience at Stanford University. After receiving his Doctor of Philosophy, Wang worked at Duke University as a postdoctoral fellow, in the United States Senate, and as a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
Career
Wang was raised in Riverside, California. In the last position he learned to use pulsed lasers and two-photon microscopy to study brain signaling before coming to Princeton as Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology. In 2006, Wang became Associate Professor of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience at Princeton University.
His current research program addresses learning and plasticity in the brain, with a focus on the cerebellum, a major brain structure that processes unexpected sensory and other information, and guides movement and cognitive/emotional processing.
He has a major interest in autism, a disorder in which the cerebellum has disrupted structure more often than any other brain region. He gives public lectures on a regular basis and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and the Fox News Channel.
Wang has been widely honored for his scholarship and his advances in neuroscience. He was also selected by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as a Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow, and he served on the staff of the United States. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources.
In 2004, Wang was one of the first to aggregate United States Presidential polls using probabilistic methods.
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, based on polls only, ended up precisely at the actual electoral outcome, Bush 286, Kerry 252 EV. In 2008, Sam Wang and Andrew Ferguson founded the Princeton Election Consortium blog, in which he analyzes United States. national election polling. His statistical analysis in 2012 correctly predicted the presidential vote outcome in 49 of 50 states and even the two candidate popular vote of 51.1% to 48.9%.
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.
