1. Brian Wansink was the executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion from 2007 to 2009 and held the John S Dyson Endowed Chair in the Applied Economics and Management Department at Cornell University, where he directed the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.
On September 20,2018, Cornell determined that Brian Wansink had committed scientific misconduct and removed him from research and teaching activities; he resigned effective June 30,2019.
Brian Wansink was raised in a blue-collar family and is the older brother of Craig Wansink, a professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Virginia Wesleyan.
Brian Wansink then taught at the Wharton Graduate School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and went on to a position as a marketing, nutritional science, advertising, and agricultural economics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before moving to the Department of Applied Economics and Management in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University in 2005.
Brian Wansink set up a nonprofit foundation to support his work in 1999.
In 2005, Brian Wansink's lab published experimental findings in a paper called "Bottomless bowls: why visual cues of portion size may influence intake".
In 2007, Brian Wansink received the Ig Nobel Prize in nutrition for the "bottomless bowls" study.
In 2006, Brian Wansink published Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.
Brian Wansink was appointed as the executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion from November 2007 through January 2009.
Brian Wansink was responsible for oversight of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, MyPyramid.
In 2011, Brian Wansink was elected to a one-year-term as president of the Society for Nutrition Education.
The investigation did find multiple cases of self-plagiarism and confirmed "numerous instances of inappropriate data handling and statistical analysis", requiring Brian Wansink to hire independent, external statistical experts to check and reanalyze his own review of the papers.
In September 2018, Cornell determined that Brian Wansink had committed scientific misconduct and removed him from all teaching and research positions; he was only allowed to help in investigations of his published work.
Brian Wansink resigned from the university, effective June 30,2019.
Brian Wansink's wife trained as a chef at Le Cordon Bleu.