L. Rafael Reif

Title: MIT President Emeritus

Rafael Reif served as the 17th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from July 2012 to December 2022. He led MIT’s pioneering efforts to help redefine the future of higher education, with a commitment to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. Dr. Reif launched initiatives to foster breakthrough research and pilot high-impact solutions to address the urgent challenges of climate change. A champion for both fundamental science and MIT’s signature style of interdisciplinary, problem-centered research, he also pursued an aggressive agenda to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship.

Prior to MIT, Dr. Reif received the degree of Ingeniero Eléctrico from Universidad de Carabobo, Valencia, Venezuela, and served for a year as an assistant professor at Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. He earned his doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University, where he spent a year as a visiting assistant professor. After moving to MIT, Dr. Reif held the Analog Devices Career Development Professorship in EECS and an IBM Faculty Fellowship from MIT’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering. He received a United States Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984.