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.

Leo 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.