Getting to Know: Bao Wang

Bao Wang, assistant professor of mathematics, recently joined the Department of Mathematics. Wang was raised in the modern and populous city of Nanjing, the capital of China’s Jiangsu province, about 185 miles up the Yangtze River from the city of Shanghai. “I’m grateful because my parents always gave me the freedom to choose what I was interested in, and I was also able to participate in lots of math and physics contests when I was in middle and high school,” he said.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Suzhou University, he was accepted at Michigan State and received a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 2016. Before coming to the U, he was an assistant adjunct professor at the Department of Mathematics at UCLA.

Bao Wang

Deep Learning

Wang is interested in deep learning and scientific computing—he specializes in studying recurrent neural nets, graph neural nets, data privacy, stochastic optimization, and computational chemistry.

“During my postdoc research at UCLA, I became quite excited about deep learning and its ability to revolutionize science and technology, so I started working on developing mathematical algorithms to improve deep learning,” he said. He borrows ideas from differential equations and random matrix theory to develop new data privacy algorithms that use better and more efficient models. He also uses deep learning to predict such things in biomathematics as protein structure and computational imaging.

Wang and his wife first visited Utah at the end of 2018 and have moved here during the pandemic. “We haven’t been able to see much due to COVID, but we’re looking forward to exploring this gorgeous state,” he said.