Marshall David Brain is an American author, public speaker, and entrepreneur. A college instructor and computer programmer, Brain is the founder of HowStuffWorks. Marshall was born in Santa Monica, California. He graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York in 1983 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He was a member of the Alpha Chi Rho fraternity. Brain earned a master’s degreein computer science from North Carolina State University (NCSU).

Before founding HowStuffWorks, Marshall taught in the computer science department at NCSU for six years. He has written computer programming manuals and has run a software training and consulting company.

Marshall founded the website HowStuffWorks.com in 1998 and ran the site until 2002, when he sold it to The Convex Group, an Atlanta-based investment company owned by former Web MD CEO Jeff Arnold, for around $1 million. In 2007, Convex sold it to Discovery Communications for $250 million. Since 2008, a television documentary with the same name has aired on the Discovery Channel.