Jennifer Chayes

Associate Provost, Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society; Dean, School of Information; Professor

Biography

Jennifer Chayes is Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society and Dean of the School of Information. She is a professor of EECS, mathematics, statistics, and the School of Information. Before joining Berkeley, she was at Microsoft for over 20 years, where she was Technical Fellow, and founder and managing director of three interdisciplinary labs: Microsoft Research New England, New York City, and Montreal. Chayes has received numerous awards for both leadership and scientific contributions, including the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Leadership Award, the John von Neumann Award of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and an honorary doctorate from Leiden University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
Chayes’ research areas include phase transitions in computer science, and structural and dynamical properties of networks including modeling and graph algorithms. Chayes is one of the inventors of the field of graphons, which are widely used for the machine learning of large-scale networks. Her recent work focuses on machine learning, including both theory and applications in cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision making, and climate change.