I'm Brian Wansink. People call me a "pracademic" -- an academic who has a practical mission to help change behavior and improve people's lives. I was a professor for 30 years, and I worked at discovering new ways to help people be happier, healthier, and more meaningfully connected. Along the way I also discovered I loved mentoring graduate students and new professors, and I also discovered I loved to play the saxophone in weekend rock bands.
Thirty years later, I’m now doing the same three things with a bit more focus. First, I’ve narrowed my research and outreach to specifically help families become happier, healthier, and more connected through the Family Meal Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that my wife and I founded. Second, I am trying to mentor and help graduate students and new faculty through my website AcademicsOnly.org. Last, I’ve started a new passion project that I think will be useful to other horn players and back-up musicians in pop, rock, and R&B bands.
Thirty years later, I’m now doing the same three things with a bit more focus. First, I’ve narrowed my research and outreach to specifically help families become happier, healthier, and more connected through the Family Meal Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that my wife and I founded. Second, I am trying to mentor and help graduate students and new faculty through my website AcademicsOnly.org. Last, I’ve started a new passion project that I think will be useful to other horn players and back-up musicians in pop, rock, and R&B bands.
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After finishing my PhD at Stanford, I started my career as a professor. I was fortunate to teach at four amazing schools (Dartmouth, Wharton, University of Illinois, and Cornell) where I did research with awesome students (like those pictured above) in my Food and Brand Lab. Our goal was to discover secret insights that would make it easier for people to eat better, and we would then work to turn these insights into free programs that could be scaled-up to help lots of people (like the Smarter Lunchrooms program).
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I resigned from Cornell in 2019, and I'm very grateful and proud of my practical discoveries and publications related to eating behavior. I hope this website can provide initial direction for people who are interested in changing eating behavior either in their own life (see the For You or For Families tabs above, or the book Mindless Eating) or changing eating behavior on a wider scale (see the For School Lunches, For Workplace Wellness, Grocery Shoppers, or Restaurant Lovers tabs above, or the see the books Slim by Design or Marketing Nutrition).
The ideas and tools we discovered have been published in 300 or so peer-reviewed journal articles, but many of them can also be found in much more readable "How-to" books:
• How to discover unmet customer needs (Asking Questions and Consumer Panels),
• How to market healthy foods (Marketing Nutrition),
• How we can eat better, enjoy food more, and lose weight (Mindless Eating), and
• How restaurants, grocers, schools, and your company can profitably help us to love eating healthier (Slim by Design).
The goal of these "how-to" books is to provide solutions: To help a researcher ask a more penetrating and actionable question, to help a manager of a healthy packaged food more quickly gain market share, to help a dieter eat better and lose weight, or to help an school, company, restaurant, or grocer to create scalable programs to help make us eat healthier and to be happier doing it. Some companies have used these ideas and tools to help their customers (such as McDonalds and Kelloggs), and others have used them to help their employees (such as Google and the Armed Forces).
These books are designed to give practical, out-of-the-box solutions, and this website is designed to help. I hope that between the five of them (along with the published articles), you'll find what you need to help improve either your life, your family's lives, or the lives of others.
The ideas and tools we discovered have been published in 300 or so peer-reviewed journal articles, but many of them can also be found in much more readable "How-to" books:
• How to discover unmet customer needs (Asking Questions and Consumer Panels),
• How to market healthy foods (Marketing Nutrition),
• How we can eat better, enjoy food more, and lose weight (Mindless Eating), and
• How restaurants, grocers, schools, and your company can profitably help us to love eating healthier (Slim by Design).
The goal of these "how-to" books is to provide solutions: To help a researcher ask a more penetrating and actionable question, to help a manager of a healthy packaged food more quickly gain market share, to help a dieter eat better and lose weight, or to help an school, company, restaurant, or grocer to create scalable programs to help make us eat healthier and to be happier doing it. Some companies have used these ideas and tools to help their customers (such as McDonalds and Kelloggs), and others have used them to help their employees (such as Google and the Armed Forces).
These books are designed to give practical, out-of-the-box solutions, and this website is designed to help. I hope that between the five of them (along with the published articles), you'll find what you need to help improve either your life, your family's lives, or the lives of others.
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