Mohammad Reza Aref (Persian: محمدرضا عارف , PhD, born 1951 in Yazd) is an Iranian academic, electrical engineer and politician and a professor at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. From 2001 to 2005, he was the Vice President of Iran under President Mohammad Khatami. He was succeeded by Parviz Dawoodi.
Aref was a chancellor of the University of Tehran (1994–1997). From August 28, 1997 to June 2000, he was the Minister of Post, Telegraph, and Telephone (PTT), a post that was later renamed to Minister of Communications and Information Technology.
He received the Bachelor's degree in electronics engineering from University of Tehran, and the Master's and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and communication engineering from Stanford University in 1975, 1976 and 1980, respectively. His PhD dissertation was on the information theory of networks, supervised by Prof. Thomas M. Cover. Until 1994, he was a faculty member of Isfahan University of Technology. As of 2004, he serves as a professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at Sharif University of Technology. He offers courses on cryptography and coding theory.