Sinan Aral is a scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and professor. He is the David Austin Professor of Management 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 (until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). 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.
He currently serves 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.
Aral’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. 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.
