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. He currently has affiliate appointments in the Program in Law and Public Affairs, the Center for Cognitive Science, the Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology, and the Center for Information Technology Policy. Wang applies data analytics to American politics through the  Princeton Election Consortium and the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.