Jennifer Chayes

Associate Provost, Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society, and Dean of the School of Information, UC Berkeley.

Real name: 
Jennifer Chayes

Jennifer Chayes is the Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society, and the Dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley. She is a professor in the departments of EECS, Mathematics, Statistics, and the School of Information. Before joining Berkeley, she was a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where she was the founder and managing director of interdisciplinary Microsoft Research labs in 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.