President-elect L. Rafael Reif

President-elect L. Rafael Reif 

L. Rafael Reif is a Venezuelan American electrical engineer and academic administrator. He is the provost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will be the 17th president of MIT when he succeeds Susan Hockfield in July 2012. Reif previously served as the head of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the director of the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

Rafael Reif was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, to Eastern-European Jewish parents, who immigrated to Venezuela in the 1930s through Ecuador and Colombia. His father was a photographer, and the family spoke Yiddish and Spanish at home

Reif received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the Universidad de Carabobo, Valencia, Venezuela in 1973. He then served for a year as an assistant professor at Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. He came to the United States for graduate school, earning his doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1979. He then spent a year as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford.

Reif joined the MIT faculty in January 1980 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering. He was promoted to associate professor in 1983, earned tenure in 1985, and became a full professor in 1988. He now holds the Maseeh Professorship in Emerging Technology.

Before his appointment as Provost in 2005, his research centered on three-dimensional integrated circuit technologies and on environmentally benign microelectronics fabrication.

Reif was director of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, then associate department head for Electrical Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), MIT's largest academic department, and then served as EECS department head in 2004-2005.

eif is a fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers and is a member of Tau Beta Pi and the Electrochemical Society. The Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), awarded him the 2000 Aristotle Award for “his commitment to the educational experience of SRC students and the profound and continuing impact he has had on their professional careers.” For his work in developing MITx, MIT's initiative in developing free online college courses available to learners anywhere with an Internet connection, which was launched in December 2011, he received the 2012 Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award.