Jennifer Chayes

Jennifer Tour Chayes is Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society, and Dean of the School of Information, at University of California, Berkeley. She is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Information, Statistics, and Mathematics.

Chayes is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fields Institute, Association for Computing Machinery, American Mathematical Society, and Association of Women in Mathematics. Among her many honors, she is the recipient of the 2012 Anita Borg Women of Vision Leadership Award; the 2015 John von Neumann Award, the highest honor of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics; and an Honorary Doctorate from Leiden University 2016.

Chayes is the author of about 150 academic papers and inventor of over 30 patents. Her research areas include phase transitions in computing, structural and dynamical properties of networks, graph theory, graph algorithms, and computational biology. She is a co-inventor of the field of graphons, which are now widely used in machine learning of networks at scale. Chayes’ recent work focuses on machine learning, with applications in biomedicine, climate change, and algorithmic fairness.

Chayes was at Microsoft for almost 23 years, where she was most recently Technical Fellow (CVP), Co-Founder and Managing Director of three interdisciplinary labs: Microsoft Research New England, NYC, and Montreal. She was for many years Professor of Mathematics at UCLA. She was twice a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Chayes holds a BA in biology and physics from Wesleyan, where she graduated 1st in her class, and a PhD in mathematical physics from Princeton. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and Cornell.

Chayes is deeply committed to increasing diversity and inclusion in STEM.