Wilfrid Gangbo began his undergraduate education in Benin and then moved to Switzerland in 1983 to undertake a second undergraduate program at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He obtained a PhD degree from the same institution under the supervision of Professor Bernard Dacorogna in 1992. Wilfrid Gangbo obtained his Habilitation at Universite de Metz in France in 1995.

He thereafter moved to the United States to hold a postdoctoral position at the mathematics department of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He later held a second postdoctoral position at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley. Wilfrid Gangbo thereafter joined the school of mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology as an assistant professor in 1995. He was promoted to professor of mathematics seven years later. In 2016, he accepted the position of professor of mathematics at the University of California in Los Angeles.

His research interests are calculus of variations and partial differential equations. His main works appeared in the theory of optimal transportation, and this naturally led him to contribute to the theory of Mean Field Games. His publications appeared in international journals, including Annals of Mathematics, Acta Mathematica, and Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. Wilfrid Gangbo was awarded the 2018-19 Chancellor Professorship by the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley. Wilfrid Gangbo was invited to join the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in 2013.