Youssef is the Class of 1942 Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. He received his SB (1997), SM (1999), and PhD (2004) degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT. Afterwards, he spent four years at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California—first as a Truman postdoctoral fellow and then as a senior member of the technical staff—before returning to MIT and joining the faculty in 2009. He is a recipient of the Hertz Foundation Doctoral Thesis Prize (2004), the DOE Early Career Research Award (2010), and the MIT Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching (2012). Youssef is also an avid coffee drinker and classical pianist.