Sheena Iyengar

Sheena S. Iyengar is a world expert on choice and decision-making. Her book The Art of Choosing received the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2010 award, and was ranked #3 on the Amazon.com Best Business and Investing Books of 2010. Her research is regularly cited in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist as well as in popular books, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance. Dr. Iyengar has also appeared on television, including the Today Show, the Daily Show, and Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN. Her TED Talks have collectively received almost four million views and her research continues to inform markets, businesses, and individuals around the world.

Dr. Iyengar is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School. Growing up in New York City as a blind Indian American and the daughter of immigrants, she began to look at the choices she and others had, and how to get the most from choice. She first started researching choice as an undergrad at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where she graduated with a B.S. in Economics. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University where her dissertation, “Choice and its Discontents,” received the Best Dissertation Award. Dr. Iyengar received the Presidential Early Career Award in 2002, and in 2011 and 2019, she was named a member of the Thinkers50, a global ranking of the top 50 management thinkers. She won the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Core Teaching from Columbia Business School in 2012 and was named one of the World’s Best B-School Professors by Poets and Quants. She has also given keynotes, and consulted for companies as wide ranging as Deloitte, Google, Bloomberg, Blizzard Entertainment, J.P. Morgan & Chase, and The North Face.

In a groundbreaking, new course called “Think Bigger,” Dr. Iyengar created a six step method for teaching people how to take advantage of lessons learned from neurological and cognitive science to put our minds to work when generating our best ideas. Her new book Think Bigger will be released in 2021.

Education

• Ph.D. Stanford University
• Bachelor’s Degree University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School
• Bachelor’s Degree University of Pennsylvania

Awards And Honors

• GovLab Faculty Member Recipient of Three-Year Research Network Grant on Opening Governance
  MacArthur Foundation, January 2014

• EMBA-NY Saturday 2013 Commitment to Excellence Award
  Columbia Business School, April 2013

• President's Global Innovation Fund Grant Recipient
  Columbia University, August 2013

• World's Best B-School Professors
  Columbia Business School, Poets and Quants, October 2012

• Dean's Award for Outstanding Core Teaching
  Columbia Business School, September 2012

• Best Article Award
  Journal of Consumer Research, September 2012

• Publisher's Award for Excellence (The Art of Choosing)
  India Abroad, June 2011

• Voted Among Top 50 Most Influential Business Thinkers
  Thinkers50, November 2011

• Top Ten Business & Investing Books of 2010 (The Art of Choosing)
  Amazon.com, November 2010

• Best Business Books of the Year 2010 (The Art of Choosing)
  Financial Times & Goldman Sachs, September 2010

• Innovation in the Curriculum Teaching Award (Group Award)
  Columbia Business School, Fall 2005

• Presidential Early Career Award for Social Scientists
  Executive Office of the President for Social Scientists, Office of Science and Technology Policy, January 2002

• Best Dissertation Award
  Society for Experimental Social Psychology, October 1998

• B.F. Skinner Lecturer.
  ABAI 43rd Annual Convention.

• Graduation Keynote Speaker
  Graduation keynote speaker, at Columbia Business School Global Center Asia.