Photo: Columbia Business School / CC BY 3.0 (source: Wikimedia Commons)
My Take
Sheena Iyengar is a thinker I genuinely admire because she turned something we all do constantly, choosing, into rigorous science. As a Columbia Business School professor known as the expert on choice, she explored why people crave options and how too many can actually paralyze us, which reshaped how I think about decision-making. What moves me more is the backstory: born in Toronto to Sikh immigrant parents and blind from a young age, she built a career studying freedom and constraint. That she earned a Presidential Early Career Award after her Stanford training signals serious credibility. Her work feels less like academic abstraction and more like a practical map for living.
Overview
Sheena S. Iyengar is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Department at Columbia Business School, widely and best known as an expert on choice. Her research focuses on the many facets of decision making, including: why people want choice, what affects how and what we choose, and how we can improve our decision making.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- Sheena Iyengar
- Name (Japanese)
- シーナ・アイエンガー
- Reading
- しーな・あいえんがー
- Born
- November 29, 1969 (age 56)
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Sagittarius / Rooster
- Origin
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- writer / university teacher / psychologist / economist
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Private
- University
- Stanford University
Awards & achievements
- 2001 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
6. Links
Writer — see all → · University teacher — see all → · More people from Canada →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-02
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.