Sinan Aral

Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT, and Data Science at MIT, and a founding partner at Manifest Capital. In his role at MIT, he not only co-leads MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy but also serves as the director of the MIT Social Analytics Lab. 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 on the Advisory Boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science, the Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation, and C6 Bank, Brazil's first all-digital bank.

Over the years, Aral has worked closely with leading Fortune 500 firms like Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, Yahoo, AirBnB, Jet.com, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, and SAP to realize business value from big data analytics, social media, and IT investments. His dedication to research and teaching has garnered him numerous awards, including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship, the Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan’s highest teaching honor), and more than ten best paper awards conferred by his colleagues in research. In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40,” and in 2018, he became the youngest-ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. He achieved further recognition when he was named a top management thinker in the world by Thinkers50 in 2021 and 2023, and when he received the Thinkers50 2021 Digital Thinking Award.

Aral’s research extends beyond business applications to societal issues, as showcased by his influential 2018 publication on the “Spread of False News Online,” which was featured on the cover of Science and was named the second most influential scientific publication of the year across disciplines. His expertise in the impact of social media on society is also highlighted in his book "The Hype Machine," which explores how social media is disrupting our democracies, our economies, and our public health, and won several awards after its publication in 2020. As a respected public speaker, Aral has shared his insights and expertise at various conferences and events. He 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.