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Sinan Aral

Director, MIT IDE; Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

Sinan Aral is a scientist, entrepreneur and investor, who is ranked among the top 50 management scholars in the world and was rated the World’s “Top Digital Thinker” in 2021. He is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT and Data Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a Founding Partner at the venture capital firms Manifest Capital and Milemark Capital. He has been called “one of the first and most prescient scholars of social media” by former U.S. Undersecretary of State Richard Stengle.

Sinan 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 has served on the Advisory Boards of the Alan Turing Institute (the British National Institute for Data Science in London), the Center for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Norway, and C6 Bank, the first all digital bank of Brazil.

Sinan’s research and teaching has earned 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 the Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award. In 2018, he became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. His first book, The Hype Machine, which New York Magazine called “prophetic,” was named a 2020 Best Book on Artificial Intelligence by WIRED.

Sinan earned his PhD at MIT and his Master’s degrees at the LSE and Harvard. You can find him on Twitter @sinanaral and Instagram @professorsinan.

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