Pennsylvania’s Congressional districting is an outlier: Expert Report

I am an Associate professor in the department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, where I have been a member of the faculty since 2013. I received my Ph.D. in Mathematics from Rutgers University in 2010 under the supervision of József Beck, and I am an expert on stochastic processes and discrete probability. My research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation. A current CV with a list of publications is attached as Exhibit A. A list of my publications with links to online manuscripts is also available at my website at http://math.cmu.edu/~wes. In early 2017 I published a paper which gave a new statistical test to demonstrate that a configuration is unusual from among a set of candidate configurations, with my coauthors Maria Chikina and Alan Frieze. Our paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that a simple and intuitive procedure can demonstrate that a given configuration is an outlier in a rigorous statistical sense, and in that paper, we showed that our test can be used to demonstrate that a Congressional districting is gerrymandered. A copy of the paper is attached as Exhibit B. Probability is a central aspect of my research; as shown on my CV, I have published papers in several well-regarded journals in probability, including Annals of Applied Probability and Random Structures and Algorithms. Many of these papers are also collaborations between myself and Alan Frieze, one of my co-authors on the [CFP] paper. Our PNAS paper (including preliminary analyses of Pennsylvania’s Congressional districting) was published before I was contacted by the lawyers for the present case. I am being compensated at a rate of $250 per hour for my work on the current case.