Rashid Alievich Sunyaev (born March 1, 1943 in Tashkent, USSR) is a Soviet and Russian astrophysicist of Tatar descent. He was educated at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MS). He became a professor at MIPT in 1974. Sunyaev was the head of the High Energy Astrophysics Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and has been chief scientist of the Academy's Space Research Institute since 1992. He has also been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany since 1996.He receive Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics from the Franklin Institute in 2012.