Martin E. Sandbu is of Norwegian and Polish origin and grew up in Oslo, Norway. He has since lived and worked in a number of countries, including France, England, and the United States. He was educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen, France; Balliol College in the University of Oxford; and Harvard University. He speaks English, French, Norwegian and Polish, dabbles in Spanish and German, and is currently learning Arabic.

Throughout his academic career, Sandbu has been interested in questions at the intersection between economics, politics and philosophy. At Balliol College, Oxford University, he studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics for his B.A. degree. He has since continued to work in all of these disciplines, in the conviction that each of the three subjects has things to learn from the insights of one another, and that they in many cases provide different perspectives on the same question. He pursued this approach in the Ph.D.-program in Political Economy and Government at Harvard University, from where he graduated in 2003. This program is jointly housed in the Department of Economics, the Department of Government, and the Kennedy School of Government. While at Harvard, Sandbu worked on three main fields of study: political philosophy, behavioural economics and the economics of fairness perceptions, and international and development economics. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis, titled "Explorations in Process-Dependent Preference Theory," under the supervision of professor Amartya Sen.

Sandbu moved to New York City in 2003 to join the new Postdoctoral Fellows Program at Columbia University's Earth Institute. This program, designed to allow young scholars to work on policy-related questions in economic development, led him to study the role of natural resources in economic development, and in particular the political economy reasons for why natural resource-rich developing countries so often fail so miserably in their development process. This problem carries on particular poignancy for Sandbu, being as he is from Norway, one of very vew countries to have escaped the "Curse of Natural Resources." Starting during his time at Columbia, he participated in the Columbia University Advisory Project for São Tomé e Príncipe, a small West African island state which he has visited several times. As part of this project, he assisted the government of STP in preparing its oil revenue management law and designing its National Forum, a country-wide popular deliberation process. He also has also advised on oil management and other development questions in East Timor Bolivia.

He joined Wharton's Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics as a Lecturer in Business Ethics in 2005. He teaches "Ethics and Corporate Responsbility," the main ethics course in Wharton's undergraduate curriculum. In addition to his work on business ethics, he continues pursuing questions in preference theory and the political economy of development.

Sandbu maintains close links with his native Norway. He co-founded the think-tank Liberalt Laboratorium ("Liberal Laboratory," popularly known as LibLab) in 2004, and serves as chair of its board. He also co-directs a new effort to set up its Working Group on Islam and Liberal Society. He frequently contributes Op-Ed pieces to the Norwegian press, on Norwegian politics, liberalism, or economic development.