Prof. Sinan Kayhan Aral

Sinan Aral is a scientist, entrepreneur and investor. He is the David Austin Chaired Professor of Management, IT, Marketing and Data Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a founding partner at Manifest Capital. 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 on the Advisory Boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science in London, the Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil. Through his work at Manifest, Sinan also advises startups like Alphonso, Algolift, Alyce, Crexi, Fable, Fortem, Interviewing.io, Jebbit, Strivr and Vidmob. Aral’s research and teaching have won 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 the year before he was the Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Times. In 2018, Aral became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. In that same year his article on the spread of false news online ended up on the cover of Science magazine, a piece Altmetrics called the second most influential publication of the year. Aral 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.