Jennifer Tour Chayes is the University of California, Berkeley Associate Provost for the Division of Data Science and Information and Dean of the School of Information. She was formerly a Technical Fellow and Managing Director of Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she founded in 2008, and Microsoft Research New York City, which she founded in 2012. Chayes is best known for her work on phase transitions in discrete mathematics and computer science, structural and dynamical properties of self-engineered networks, and algorithmic game theory. She is considered one of the world's experts in the modeling and analysis of dynamically growing graphs. Chayes has been with Microsoft Research since 1997, when she co-founded the Theory Group. She received her Ph.D. in mathematical physics at Princeton University in 1983. She is Affiliate Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Washington, and was for many years Professor of Mathematics at UCLA. She is an author on almost 120 scientific papers and the inventor on more than 25 patents.
Early life and education
Chayes was born in New York City and grew up in White Plains, N.Y., the child of Iranian immigrants. She received her B.A. in Biology and Physics from Wesleyan University in 1979 where she graduated first in her class. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics at Princeton University. She did her postdoctoral work in the Mathematics and Physics departments at Harvard and Cornell.
Career
She moved to UCLA as a tenured Professor of Mathematics in 1987. While she was on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1997, Microsoft CTONathan Myhrvold, a classmate of Chayes's from Princeton, asked her to start and lead the Theory Group at Microsoft Research Redmond. The Theory Group analyzes fundamental questions in theoretical computer science using techniques from statistical physics and discrete mathematics. Chayes opened Microsoft Research New England in July 2008 with Borgs. The lab is located at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center and is pursuing new, interdisciplinary areas of research that bring together core computer scientists and social scientists to understand, model, and enable future computing and online experiences. On May 3, 2012, the New York Times reported that, "Microsoft is opening a research lab in New York City…" which Chayes will co-manage. The new lab also brings together computer scientists and social scientists, particularly in the areas of economics, computational and behavioral social sciences, and machine learning. Chayes is currently Managing Director of both Microsoft Research New England and Microsoft Research New York City. She has contributed the development of methods to analyze the structure and behavior of various networks, the design of auction algorithms, and the design and analysis of various business models for the online world.
Chayes married Christian Borgs in 1993 and was previously married to Lincoln Chayes whom she met at Wesleyan. She has had extremely successful collaborations with both her husbands; of her 94 papers in MathSciNet, 51 are coauthored with Christian Borgs and 37 are coauthored with Lincoln Chayes.
