Marshall David Brain is the founder of HowStuffWorks. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he was a member of the Alpha Chi Rho fraternity. Brain went on to receive a master's degree in computer science from North Carolina State University . Before founding HowStuffWorks, Marshall taught in the computer science department at NCSU and ran a software training and consulting company.

He also maintains a website with, among others, essays on transhumanism and robots and an online science-fiction novel on that topic, Manna. Brain argues in his new Robot Nation series that automation will lead to structural unemployment, requiring a guaranteed basic income.