Growing up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Professor Jianjun Wang learned not to blindly trust authority. The combination of boldness and curiosity led him to discover scientific mistakes in a National Science Foundation-funded study that cost U.S. taxpayers more than $51 million. He also generalized a Poisson model from George Rasch, the forefather of the modern Item Response Theory, rendering Rasch’s model as a special case of a more general model for examining test misgrading.

Wang earned graduate degrees in statistics, physics, and science education. He is the principal investigator for evaluating an extensive grant that has a budget of more than $10 million annually during the past five years.

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