Rate My Professor Rafael Reif

L. Rafael Reif is President Emeritus and the Ray and Maria Stata Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A member of the MIT faculty since 1980, he earned the degree of Ingeniero Eléctrico from Universidad de Carabobo in Valencia, Venezuela, and MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He joined MIT as an assistant professor in electrical engineering, was promoted to associate professor in 1983, received tenure in 1985, and became a full professor in 1988. Prior to his administrative roles, Reif held the Analog Devices Career Development Professorship in EECS and an IBM Faculty Fellowship. He served as director of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, associate department head for electrical engineering, and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 2004 to 2005. He was named the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technology in 2004. Reif served as MIT provost from 2005 to 2012 and as the institute’s seventeenth president from 2012 to 2022.

Reif’s research focuses on electrical engineering, including low-temperature epitaxial growth of semiconductor thin films, three-dimensional integrated circuit technologies, and the fabrication of environmentally benign microelectronics. He is an inventor or co-inventor on thirteen patents, has edited or co-edited five books, and has supervised thirty-eight doctoral theses. He received the United States Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984 and was elected a fellow of the IEEE in 1993 for his pioneering work in semiconductor thin films. Additional honors include the Semiconductor Research Corporation’s Aristotle Award in 2000, the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award in 2012, the Frank E. Taplin, Jr. Public Intellectual Award in 2015, and the National Academy of Engineering’s Simon Ramo Founders Award in 2022. Reif is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. He has received honorary doctorates from several institutions, including Tsinghua University and the Technion.