Brian Wansink grew up in Sioux City, Iowa. He received a B.A. at Wayne State University in 1982, an M.S. at Drake University in 1984 and a Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1990. Dr. Wansink has had academic appointments at Dartmouth College’s Amos Tuck School of Business, Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, INSEAD at Fountainbleau, France, US Army Research Labs, and Cornell University. Dr. Wansink is currently taking a leave of absence from his position as the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and the Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab in the Department of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Wansink has spent his career studying the psychology behind what people eat and how often they eat it. His book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think was published in 2006. He is also the author of Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology, and Obesity.

Wansink was appointed  November 19, 2007, and served until 2009.