Professor Ronald Rivest is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and a founder of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He is a co-author (with Cormen, Leiserson, and Stein) of the text, Introduction to Algorithms. He is also a founder of RSA Data Security, now named RSA Security (the security division of EMC), Versign, and Peppercoin.

Professor Rivest has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, electronic voting, and algorithms. In the past he has also worked extensively in the area of machine learning.

Professor Rivest is a co-author (with Professors Corman, Leiserson, and Stein) of the well-known text Introduction to Algorithms, published by MIT Press. Over 500,000 copies of this text have been sold. It has been translated into 12 langauges.