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MIT Vice President Claude Canizares stepping down

Claude Canizares, MIT Vice President and Bruno Rossi Professor of Physics, will be stepping down at the end of the current academic year. He will leave his position on June 30 and will take a sabbatical after stepping down.

Canizares came to MIT as a postdoc in 1971 and became a faculty member in the Department of Physics in 1974. In 2001, he was appointed Associate Provost, then became Vice President for Research in 2006. Canizares has served as MIT’s Vice President since January 2013. He also serves as the Associate Director of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory Center.

In an e-mail to the MIT community, President L. Rafael Reif wrote, “Claude has excelled at making contributions that have touched nearly every corner of the Institute.”

Canizares “played a key role in establishing the MIT Energy Initiative, the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and he spearheaded the formation of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Consortium,” wrote Reif. Canizares has also been an integral part of developing MIT’s recent international collaborations, including connections in Singapore, Russia, and Abu Dhabi.

“MIT is an outstanding institution, thanks entirely to its remarkable people,” Canizares said in an interview with MIT News. “It has been my great privilege to serve three presidents and four provosts and work with a host of senior administration, faculty, and staff over the past 13 years.”

—Alexandra Delmore