Sheena Iyengar Biography

Sheena S. Iyengar is the Columbia Business School's first S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division. She has taught a wide range of MBA and Executive MBA students at Columbia on themes including as leadership, decision making, innovation, and globalization, garnering an Innovation in the Teaching Curriculum award along the way. Dr. Iyengar was also recently chosen by Columbia University's President's Office to lecture at the World Economic Forum's Global Leadership Fellows Program in Geneva, Switzerland. Dr. Iyengar, one of the world's choice experts, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 with a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School of Business and a B.A. in psychology with a minor in English from the College of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford University in 1997. Dr. Iyengar grew interested in how individuals make choices during her studies at Stanford, particularly the centrality and universality of choice in people's lives. Her dissertation, "Choice and its Discontents," won the Society of Experimental Social Psychology's coveted Best Dissertation Award in 1998. The National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Security Education Program have all financed Dr. Iyengar's novel choice study. The Executive Office of the President presented her with the Presidential Early Career Award for Social Scientists in 2002. Throughout her career, her research has been cited in a variety of publications, including Fortune and Time magazines, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as on National Public Radio and in popular books such as Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. Dr. Iyengar's love for this subject led her down the amazing road of creating The Art of Choosing. Choices define and influence our lives, whether they are commonplace or life-changing. Dr. Iyengar's book addresses the challenging issues regarding how and why we choose: Is the urge for choice natural or culturally conditioned? Why do we sometimes make decisions that are not in our best interests? How much influence do we have over what we choose? The findings of Dr. Iyengar's award-winning study are both startling and deep. Our actions have far-reaching repercussions in our world of shifting political and cultural forces, technological change, and networked business. Sheena Iyengar's parents moved to New York from Delhi, India, through Toronto, where she was born. Her first visit to New York was in Flushing, Queens, although she spent the most of her youth in Elmwood Park, New Jersey. Dr. Iyengar is a married man with a five-year-old kid who lives in New York.

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