Vanessa Van Edwards

Founder & Lead Investigator

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Founder & Lead Investigator

About

Vanessa Van Edwards is the founder of Science of People, a bestselling author, and behavioral investigator. She is the face of the brand and leads all content creation, speaking engagements, and strategic direction.

Responsibilities

  • Content creation and brand voice
  • Speaking engagements and corporate training
  • Strategic vision and direction
  • People School instruction
  • Book authorship

Background

Recovering awkward person, bestselling author, and Lead Investigator helping millions master the science of people skills.

Vanessa Van Edwards is a behavioral researcher, bestselling author, and Harvard University instructor who has spent two decades sharing evidence-based people skills with the world.

As founder of Science of People, a behavior research lab, she has turned the hidden dynamics of human interaction into practical, learnable frameworks. Her bestselling books Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People and Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication have been translated into 18 languages, and her research reached over 300 million people worldwide last year.

Her clients include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Comcast, and she has spoken at MIT, Stanford, and SXSW. Her work has been featured on TIME, CNN, BBC, CBS Mornings, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, USA Today, and The Today Show. Her recent MasterClass, People Intelligence, became one of the top ten most watched classes of the year.

Something good: I live in Austin, Texas, with my daughters and husband of 14+ years, and I am always on the hunt for the best breakfast taco.

Canonical bio: Vanessa’s approved bios are maintained in src/lib/author.ts in the scienceofpeople-com repo — three approved lengths (micro for cards, short for the media kit, long for the bio page and press kit). The upstream source of truth is the bio Google Doc. Team-page card data lives in src/content/team/vanessa-van-edwards.json. Never hardcode bio copy — pull the variant you need from author.ts. Synced 2026-06-23.

Books

  • Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People
  • Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication
  • Conversation (Coming October 2025)

Speaking

Vanessa has spoken at Google, Microsoft, Harvard, and Fortune 500 companies worldwide.

Contact