With Boston serving as a host city for the FIFA World Cup, the whole Bay State has soccer fever, including Henry Wang. As a child growing up in Dallas, sports were everything to him. Today, Wang is working on research that could impact some of the biggest sporting events in the world, including future World Cups. The first such event that made a big impression on Wang involved a different form of football. “The first ever sports game I remember watching was Super Bowl XLII in 2008,” he says. “I was really drawn to the competition, and the way it was presented. It’s this whole big spectacle.” Wang, a fourth-year PhD candidate in social and engineering systems within MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, studies how data and technology can improve the way sports are played, analyzed, and refereed. Working in the MIT Sports Lab in collaboration with FIFA, he de…

As a first-year student, Wang reached out to MIT Sloan School of Management Senior Lecturer Ben Shields to see if he could assist Shields with his research on sports strategy and analytics. Shields later connected Wang with a coach he knew who was interested in analyzing the two-point conversion strategy for MIT’s football team. The project revealed that MIT could benefit from attempting two-point conversions much more frequently. The experience opened the door to the MIT Sports Lab, where Wang found mentors including Lecturer Christina Chase, Professor Anette “Peko” Hosoi, and former research scientist Ferran Vidal-Codina. His research now focuses on two central questions: How can technology democratize access to sports data, and how can it help officials make better decisions? Wang works with FIFA Innovation, the group within soccer’s global governing body that lead…