Rafael L. Bras

Rafael Luis Bras (born 1950) is a Puerto Rican civil engineer best known for his contributions in soil-vegetation-atmosphere system modeling. He served as the provost and executive vice president of Academic Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 2010 to 2020 while maintaining faculty appointments in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. He is currently a professor of water engineering at the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Academic.
Bras a native of Puerto Rico studied at MIT, where he received a bachelor's (1972), a master's in civil engineering (1974), and a science doctorate in water resources and hydrology (1975). On completion of his doctorate, he worked for a time as an assistant professor at the University of Puerto Rico school of engineering, and performed some consulting work on the island.
He returned to MIT in July 1976, where he has served for more than 32 years as a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and held an appointment in the Departments of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. He is a past chair of the MIT faculty, former head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering department, and director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory at MIT.
Professional.
As an engineering hydrologist, his major areas of interest include land-atmosphere interactions and geomorphology. He is considered one of the world's leading experts in global warming, and has also served as a professional consultant in multiple projects around the world.
He is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the Boston Society of Civil Engineers, and a member of the International Association for Hydraulic Research and the American Meteorological Society. He is also a registered professional engineer in several states. He is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher by Institute for Scientific Information in Ecology/Environment, Engineering.
On April 24, 2008, Bras was appointed as dean of The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, effective September 1, 2008 .
On July 15, 2010, Bras was named provost of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
On January 22, 2020, Bras announced plans step down as provost and remain a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He officially stepped down on October 1, 2020. 