Biography

Sinan Aral is an Assistant Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences. He received his Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to MIT, he was a Fulbright Scholar and worked at the European Commission in Brussels and as a technology consultant for several Fortune 500 firms.

Professor Aral's research focuses on social contagion and measuring and managing how information diffusion in massive social networks affects information worker productivity, consumer demand and viral marketing. He also studies the role of information and information technology in the productivity and performance of firms. Sinan's research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship (2010), the PopTech Science Fellowship (2010), an NSF Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (2009), four best paper awards at the International Conference on Information Systems, the ACM SIGMIS Best Dissertation Award (2007) and the IBM Faculty Award (2009). His work has been published or is forthcoming in leading journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Information Systems Research, Management Science, Marketing Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Science, Organization Science, the Harvard Business Review and the Sloan Management Review, and has been mentioned in popular press outlets such as The Economist, The New York Times, Businessweek, Wired and CIO Magazine. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University (B.A.) and holds an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and an M.P.P. from Harvard University.

Research Interests

• Information & Productivity
• Network Structure & Information Diffusion
• Organizational Complements to IT
• Business Value & Productivity Effect of IT Capital
• IT and Business Intelligence

Academic Background

Ph.D., Information Systems, 2007
MIT Sloan School of Management

M.P.P., Information Technology Policy, 2001
Harvard University

M.Sc., Information Systems, 1999
London School of Economics

B.A., Political Science, 1996
Northwestern University

Awards & Appointments

	Microsoft Faculty Fellowship	2010
	PopTech Science and Public Leaders Fellowship	2010
	NSF Early Career Development (CAREER) Award	2009
	IBM Faculty Award	2009
	Best Overall Paper - International Conference on Information Systems	2008
	Best Dissertation, ACM SIGMIS Award	2007
	Best Overall Paper - International Conference on Information Systems	2006
	Best Paper IT Value Track - International Conference on Information Systems	2006
	Best Paper IT Economics Track - International Conference on Information Systems	2006

Selected Publications

Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker (2012)
Identifying Influential and Susceptible Members of Social Networks
Science

Sinan Aral, Marshall W. Van Alstyne (2011)
The Diversity-Bandwidth Tradeoff
American Journal of Sociology

Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker (2011)
Creating Social Contagion Through Viral Product Design: A Randomized Trial of Peer Influence in Networks
Management Science

Sinan Aral (2011)
Identifying Social Influence: A Comment on Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion
Marketing Science

Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson and Lynn Wu (2011)
Three Way Complementarities: Performance Pay, HR Analytics and Information Technology
Management Science

Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson and Marshall Van Alstyne (2011)
Information Technology and Information Worker Productivity
Information Systems Research

Sinan Aral, Lev Muchnik, and Arun Sundararajan (2009)
Distinguishing Influence Based Contagion from Homophily Driven Diffusion in Dynamic Networks
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Sinan Aral (with 14 co-authors) (2009)
Computational Social Science
Science

Sinan Aral, Peter Weill (2007)
IT Assets, Organizational Capabilities & Firm Performance: How Resource Allocations and Organizational Differences Explain Performance Variation
Organization Science

Sinan Aral and Peter Weill (2006)
Generating Premium Returns on Your IT Investments
Sloan Management Review