Michel Frederic DeGraff is a Haitian creolist who has served on the board of the Journal of Haitian Studies. He is a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. His field of scholarship is Creole language, also known as Lang Kreyòl Linguistics. He is known for his advocacy towards the recognition of Haitian Creole as a full-fledged language. In the fall of 2012, he received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to introduce online Creole language materials in the teaching of STEM in Haiti.
He believes that Haitian children should be taught in their native language at all levels of instruction, contrary to the tradition of teaching them in French. Degraff believes that instruction in French, a foreign language for most Haitian children, hinders their creativity and their ability to excel.