Your friendliness, humble style and every-darn-time excellence have won you a broad network of friends and allies who leap to pick up the phone when they see that it’s Aaron calling. With zero drama, sincere goodwill and rock-solid MIT values, you turn out staggering quantities of first-rate work, including cascades of graceful presidential prose.

Thoughtful, funny, kind, quietly brilliant and unnervingly productive, you are everyone’s favorite collaborator. Your unfailing follow-through, superb judgment and unrivalled knowledge of all things MIT make every team you serve on the best it can be.

In fact, from watching you we have come to see that in its highest form, collaboration is a form of leadership: the art of inspiring people to work together toward important goals. From the Executive Committee and Academic Council to the Presidential Advisory Committee and your everyday colleagues, every group you touch is stronger, more productive, more collegial and more focused on what really matters. You began as a team player. But, to our great good fortune, you are a team maker now.

Like a legendary diver, in everything you do you not only meet and master the first-class standard – two and half somersaults with a full twist, ending in a pike – you raise it for all time: performed backward from a handstand start, without losing your glasses or your sense of humor.

As one of your fans put it, “If there were a market for Aarons, I’d corner it.”