Jennifer Chayes *83

Jennifer Chayes is Technical Fellow and Managing Director of Microsoft Research New England, New York City and Montreal. She was for many years a professor of mathematics at UCLA. She is author of over 140 academic papers and inventor of over 30 patents. Her research areas include phase transitions in computer science, structural and dynamical properties of networks, graph theory, graph algorithms, and computational biology. She is one of the inventors of the field of graphons, which are now widely used in the machine learning of massive networks. Her recent work focuses on machine learning, broadly defined. She holds a B.A. in physics and biology from Wesleyan, where she graduated first in her class, and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and Cornell. She is the recipient of the NSF Postdoc Fellowship, the Sloan Fellowship, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and the Anita Borg Institute Women of Leadership Vision Award. She has twice been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Fields Institute, the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Mathematical Society and 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. In 2016, she received an Honorary Doctorate from Leiden University. She serves on numerous scientific boards and committees. She is a past vice president of the American Mathematical Society, past chair of Mathematics for the Association for the Advancement of Science, and past chair of the Turing Award Selection Committee. She is also committed to diversity in the science and technology, and serves on many boards to increase representation of women and minorities in STEM.