Marshall Brain an entrepreneur, author, TV personality, and 1989 N.C. State Computer Science graduate. Among his accomplishments, Brain is perhaps best known as the founder of HowStuffWorks.com, an award-winning resource website that offers clear, objective, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world works. He created the site as a hobby in 1998, eventually running it through several rounds of venture funding with a total of around $8 million. Finally, in 2007, the site was taken over by Discovery Communications for $250 million. While Brain was still leading the company, the site won countless awards including multiple Webby awards, a position among Time magazine’s “25 Websites We Can’t Live Without” in 2006 and 2007, one of PC Magazine’s “Top 100 Web Sites” four times, and was named Yahoo! Internet Life’s award as the “Best Science & Technology Resource.” Following the site’s initial success, it still remains one of the most visited sites on the WWW. According to a complete.com survey the website attracts at least 58 million visitors annually in 2008. HowStuffWorks eventually expanded into a franchise including a television series by the same name, as well as many blogs and podcasts.As a well-known public speaker with the ability to deliver complex material in a way that is easily understood by audiences of all types, Brain is a regular guest on radio and TV programs nationwide. He has been featured on everything CNN and Good Morning America to The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 2008 and 2009, he was the host of the National Geographic channel's Factory Floor With Marshall Brain, a series of one-hour factory tours taking the viewer on a journey into the world of product design, engineering and manufacturing.Brain is the author of more than a dozen books as well as a number of widely known web publications including How to Make a Million Dollars, Robotic Nation and Manna. His book The Teenager's Guide to the Real World is now in its tenth printing and was selected for the New York Public Library's prestigious "Books for the Teen Age" list. He frequently works with students at all levels to help them understand science and technology topics, entrepreneurship and how the world works. Brain now serves as the Director of the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program at NC State University, where he is teaching and inspiring the next generation of entrepreneurs. He is also working on a new book (Imagining Elon Musk's Million-Person Mars Colony, the greatest thought experiment of all time) in which he explores a new economic system with the aim of eliminating the poverty, inequality, hunger, slums and so on found on Earth today.Marshall received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic University and a M.S. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University, where he taught computer science for six years, and was selected as a member of the university’s Academy of Outstanding Teachers. In 2011, he was recognized as a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus at NC State.