CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) – The Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday named Rafael Reif, an electrical operative innate in Venezuela who has been a university’s provost given 2005, as a 17th president.
Reif, 61, replaces Susan Hockfield, a initial womanlike boss of MIT, who announced in mid-February that she was stepping down after roughly 8 years heading one of a many prestigious universities in a United States.
Reif will take adult his post during a Cambridge, Massachusetts, university on Jul 2, a initial MIT boss not to be a local English speaker.
In his purpose as provost, a comparison educational central during a university, Reif helped emanate and exercise a plan that authorised MIT to continue a tellurian financial crisis, notwithstanding a vast decrease in a endowment, and gathering a expansion of a university overseas, from Abu Dhabi to Russia.
He also led a growth of MITx, a university’s beginning in online learning, and pushed an bid to boost farrago among a university’s faculty.
He takes over during a time when many college graduates face crippling tyro debt and an capricious pursuit market, and when MIT is scheming to launch a vital fundraising debate and enhance a online training programs.
Reif is a youngest of 4 sons of émigrés who fled Eastern Europe for Latin America in a late 1930s, vital initial in Ecuador and Colombia before settling in Venezuela. Reif’s father worked as a photographer.
“I grew adult in a home rich in firmness and beliefs and values, though bad in all material,” Reif pronounced during a news discussion to announce a appointment.
Reif warranted an undergraduate grade in engineering from Venezuela’s Universidad de Carabobo in 1973. He gained a master’s and PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in California and assimilated MIT in 1980.
He was an early champion of a university’s work in micro- and nanotechnology. He binds 15 patents, has won several training awards and has supervised 38 doctoral theses.
(Reporting by Ros Krasny; Editing by David Storey and Lisa Shumaker)
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