Rafael Laufer was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 2003, he received his B.Sc. "
cum laude" degree in
Electrical and Computer Engineering from
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil. In 2005, he received the M.Sc. degree also in
Electrical Engineering at
COPPE/UFRJ. During his M.Sc. studies, he received the
FAPERJ's Bolsa Nota 10 fellowship, awarded to the top two graduate students of Electrical Engineering. He was with the
Grupo de Teleinformática e Automação (GTA Laboratory) at
COPPE/UFRJ from 2000 to 2005. Exceptionally, during 2002, he was with
Cisco Systems, Inc. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in the
Computer Science Department at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with
Leonard Kleinrock. During the summer of 2009, Rafael was an intern at
Cisco Systems, Inc. and in the fall of 2009 he was at
Technicolor Paris Research Lab. Rafael received the
Marconi Society's Young Scholar Award in 2008 in "recognition of outstanding academic achievement and intellectual promise in the field of communications science." His major research interests are distributed systems, wireless networking, security, and operating systems. He is a member of the IEEE Communications Society and a student member of IEEE.