Myron Tribus (October 30, 1921 – August 31, 2016) was an American organizational theorist, who was the director of the Center for Advanced Engineering Study at MIT from 1974 to 1986.

[1] Myron Tribus was born in San Francisco, California, on October 30, 1921 to Marie Kramer and Edward Lefkowitz.

[1][3] Tribus was a captain in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, and worked as a design-development officer at Wright Field.

He returned to academia, joining the faculty of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer.

[6] In 1969, Tribus accepted a political appointee post in the Richard M. Nixon administration as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Science and Technology.

[1] Tribus research interests ranged from academic subjects such as heat transfer, fluid mechanics, probability theory, statistical inference, and thermodynamics, to applied topics such as sea water demineralization, aircraft heating, aircraft ice prevention, and the design of engineering curricula.