Prof. Jennifer Chayes

Jennifer Tour Chayes is Distinguished Scientist, Managing Director and Cofounder of Microsoft Research New England and Microsoft Research New York City. Before joining Microsoft in 1997, Chayes was for many years Professor of Mathematics at UCLA. Chayes is the author of over 130 academic papers and the inventor of over 30 patents. Her research areas include phase transitions in discrete mathematics and computer science, structural and dynamical properties of self-engineered networks, graph theory, graph algorithms, algorithmic game theory, and computational biology. Chayes is one of the inventors of the theory of graph limits, which is widely used for machine learning of massive networks.

Chayes holds a BA in biology and physics from Wesleyan, where she graduated first in her class, and a PhD in mathematical physics from Princeton. She did postdoctoral work in the Mathematics and Physics Departments at Harvard and Cornell. She is the recipient of an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, and the ABI Women of Vision Leadership Award. She has twice been a member of the IAS in Princeton. Chayes is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Fields Institute, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Mathematical Society, and an Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the winner of the 2015 John von Neumann Lecture Award, the highest honor of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Chayes received an Honorary Doctorate from Leiden University in 2016.