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Jennifer Chayes is Associate Provost of Data Science and Information, and Dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She is 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. She received her B.A. in biology and physics at Wesleyan University and Ph.D. in mathematical physics at Princeton University. She was for many years Professor of Mathematics at UCLA, and Affiliate Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Washington. She serves on numerous institute boards, advisory committees and editorial boards, and is the recipient of many awards, including the 2015 John von Neumann Lecture Award, the highest honor of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She is an elected fellow of many societies including the American Mathematical Society, the Association of Computing Machinery, the Field Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Chayes received an Honorary Doctorate from Leiden University in 2016.
Area of Research:
Her research areas include phase transitions in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, structural and dynamical properties of large networks, mechanism design, algorithmic game theory, graph algorithms, and computational biology. Chayes is one of the inventors of graphons, now widely used in the machine learning of massive networks.