Sinan Kayhan Aral

Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management and a Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. 

His research focuses on social contagion, product virality and measuring, and managing how information diffusion in massive social networks such as Twitter and Facebook affects information worker productivity, consumer demand, and viral marketing. This research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship (2010), the PopTech Science and Public Leaders Fellowship (2010), an NSF Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (2009), the Best Overall Paper Award at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) (in both 2006 and 2008), the ICIS Best Paper in IT Economics Award (2006), the ICIS Best Paper in IT Business Value Research Award (2006), the ACM SIGMIS Best Dissertation Award (2007), and the IBM Faculty Award (2009). He has worked closely with Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Intel, the New York Times, Oracle, SAP, and many other leading Fortune 500 firms on realizing business value from social media and information technology investments. 

Sinan has been a Fulbright Scholar, has served as chief scientist and on the board of directors of SocialAmp, a social commerce company that enables targeting and peer referral in social media networks (which was sold to Merkle in January, 2012).   He is currently chief scientist of Humin and an organizer of the Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN): http://www.winworkshop.net.

He is a frequent speaker at such thought leading events as TEDxSiliconValley, TEDxColumbia Engineering, TEDxNYU, Wired’s “Nextwork,” and PopTech.  He has been the keynote speaker at executive gatherings such as Omnicom’s Global “Emerge” Summit. His work has been published in leading journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Information Systems Research, Management Science, Marketing Science, Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Science, Organization Science, the Harvard Business Review, and the Sloan Management Review. Hiw work is often featured in popular press outlets such as the Economist, the New York Times, Businessweek, Wired, Fast Company, and CIO Magazine. 

Sinan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University.  He holds an MSc  from the London School of Economics and an MPP from Harvard University, and received his PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

You can find him on Twitter @sinanaral.