Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management at MIT, where he is a Professor of IT & Marketing, and Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society where he co-leads MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.
He was the chief scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012), and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently a founding partner at Manifest Capital and on the Advisory Board of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science, in London. Sinan was the scholar-in-residence at the New York Times R&D Lab in 2013, and has worked closely with Facebook, Twitter, Snap, AirBnB, Yahoo, Jet.com, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, and many other leading Fortune 500 firms on realizing business value from big data analytics, social media, and IT investments.
Sinan’s research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and a Fulbright Scholarship. In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40” by Businessweek.
Sinan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University, holds Master’s degrees from the London School of Economics and Harvard University, and received his PhD from MIT.
He enjoys cooking, skiing, and telling jokes about his own cooking and skiing. His most recent hobby is learning from his four-year-old son. You can find Sinan on Twitter @sinanaral.
