Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Updated August 2026

Jeremy Velazquez joined the MIT coaching staff in 2022 and enters his fifth season as an assistant coach. No stranger to Rockwell Cage, he was a four-year member of the men’s volleyball team under the direction of head coach Paul Dill. A defensive specialist/libero, Velazquez holds the MIT men’s volleyball record for most sets played in a career (473) and amassed 805 digs. He was named the team’s Defensive Player of the Year as both a junior and a senior.
 
Graduating from MIT in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering, Velazquez slowly traversed fields from microphysiological devices, tissue engineering, and biomaterials, to stem cell engineering and synthetic biology. He went on to earn his PhD in cellular and molecular pathology from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 2022, returned to Cambridge, and took on assistant coach roles for the men’s and women’s teams while concurrently continuing his career in cell and gene therapeutics.
 
Velazquez has been playing and coaching volleyball since a young age under the tutelage of his mother, Karyn Altman ‘78, a former MIT player, head coach of MIT’s women’s volleyball program, and the founding head coach for the men’s varsity volleyball program. His younger brother, Jarred, was also an assistant coach for both the men’s and women’s teams for three seasons (2017-19) while Jeremy was in graduate school.