An alumnus of the California Institute of Technology, where he received a B.S. with honor in physics, Samuel Wang went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1994. He conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University and then 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. Wang joined the Princeton faculty in 2000. He is the recipient of National Science Foundation, W.M. Keck Foundation and Alfred P. Sloan Young Investigator Awards. He has written two books: Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life, and Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College. Wang is also noted for developing statistical methods to analyze U.S. presidential election polls with unusually high accuracy. He is a member of the Rita Allen Foundation Board of Directors.

Wang’s research focuses on the cerebellum’s role in cognition and social thought processes, and he uses advanced imaging methods to search for clues to the causes of autism.