Sheena Iyengar
2011 Ranking: #48
Sheena Iyengar is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, and research director of the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business.
Iyengar is best known for her work on choice. She received the Best Dissertation Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 1998, for her dissertation, "Choice and Its Discontents."
Iyengar's award winning book, The Art of Choosing was published in 2010. In it, Iyengar examines the many facets of choice: how and why people make choices, how other factors influence choice. Her aim is to better equip people to cope with the overwhelming variety of choice in everyday life.
Iyengar’s own choices have not been easy. By the time she became a teenager Iyengar's deteriorating sight (she has a degenerative retinitis pigmentosa) meant that she was already unable to read, and by her late teens she was completely blind. Despite discouragement from some quarters, Iyengar pursued her ambitions to go to college, and pursue an academic career.
