The Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics (Lerner College) will host a top social media expert to discuss the cultural effects of social media at the upcoming W.L. Gore Lecture Series in Management Science on April 28, 2016.
The speaker, Sinan Aral, is The David Austin Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He was recently named as one of Poets and Quants’ Best 40 Under 40 business school professors.
Aral has spoken at TEDxColumbia Engineering, ADSCon, PopTech, Data Gotham, and TEDxSiliconValley. He has defined the influence of Facebook and Twitter upon the culture at large as ‘social commerce’.
In a recent talk, he asked,
“How do revolutions happen that are encouraged or propagated through messages sent on social media? … This is one channel through which we can achieve great social change that we couldn’t have achieved just a few years ago.”
Sinan Aral’s research focuses on the ways in which content is both created and transmitted. Aral has won various awards, including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, and a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award. Aral is a chief scientist at Humin, an app which combines contacts from users’ iPhone, LinkedIn, and Facebook contact lists to expand their social networks.