Jennifer Tour Chayes

Jennifer Tour Chayes
Born	New York City[1]
Residence	Boston[1]
Fields	Physics Mathematics Theoretical computer science
Institutions	Microsoft Research New England Microsoft Research New York City UCLA Cornell University Harvard University
Alma mater	Wesleyan University Princeton University
Thesis	The Inverse Problem, Plaquette Percolation and a Generalized Potts Model (1983)
Doctoral advisor	Elliott H. Lieb Michael Aizenman
Known for	phase transitions discrete mathematics graph theory game theory

Jennifer Tour Chayes is Managing Director and Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she founded in 2008, and Microsoft Research New York City, which she founded in 2012 ^[1]. Chayes is best known for her work on phase transitions in discrete mathematics and computer science, structural and dynamical properties of self-engineered networks, and algorithmic game theory. She is considered one of the world's experts in the modeling and analysis of dynamically growing graphs.^[2] Chayes has been with Microsoft Research since 1997, when she co-founded the Theory Group. She received her Ph.D. in mathematical physics at Princeton University. She is Affiliate Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Washington, and was for many years Professor of Mathematics at UCLA. She is an author on almost 120 scientific papers and the inventor on more than 25 patents.

Early life and education

Chayes was born in New York City^[1] and grew up in White Plains, N.Y., the child of Iranian immigrants. She received her B.A. in Biology and Physics from Wesleyan University in 1979 where she graduated first in her class. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics at Princeton University. She did her postdoctoral work in the Mathematics and Physics departments at Harvard and Cornell. She moved to UCLA as a tenured Professor of Mathematics in 1987.

Career at Microsoft

While she was on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1997, Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, a classmate of Chayes's from Princeton, asked her to start and lead the Theory Group at Microsoft Research Redmond.^[3] The Theory Group analyzes fundamental questions in theoretical computer science using techniques from statistical physics and discrete mathematics. Chayes opened Microsoft Research New England in July 2008 with Borgs. The lab is located at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center and is pursuing new, interdisciplinary areas of research that bring together core computer scientists and social scientists to understand, model, and enable future computing and online experiences.^[2] On May 3, 2012, the New York Times reported that, "Microsoft is opening a research lab in New York City…" which Chayes will co-manage.^[4][5] The new lab also brings together computer scientists and social scientists, particularly in the areas of economics, computational and behavioral social sciences, and machine learning. Chayes is currently Managing Director of both Microsoft Research New England and Microsoft Research New York City. She has contributed the development of methods to analyze the structure and behavior of various networks, the design of auction algorithms, and the design and analysis of various business models for the online world.

Recognition

Chayes serves on numerous institute boards, advisory committees and editorial boards, including the Turing Award Selection Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Board of Trustees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics, the Advisory Boards of the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Farm Research Campus, and Women Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology. Chayes is a past Chair of the Mathematics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a past Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award.^[6][7][8][9]

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, as well as a National Associate of the National Academies. She has been the recipient of many leadership awards, including one of the 2012 Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Awards.

Awards and honors

• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship (1989)
• Member of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (1994-95, 1997)
• Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (1998)
• American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow (2006)
• Association for Computing Machinery Fellow (2010)^[10]
• American Mathematical Society Fellow (2012)^[11]
• Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award (2012) ^[12]
• Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics John von Neumann Lecture Prize (2015)
• Leiden University Honorary Doctorate (2016)^[13]

Personal life

Chayes married Christian Borgs in 1993, and was previously married to Lincoln Chayes whom she met at Princeton. She has had extremely successful collaborations with both her husbands; of her 94 papers in MathSciNet (as of February 2014), 51 are coauthored with Christian Borgs and 37 are coauthored with Lincoln Chayes.

References

External links

• Jennifer Tour Chayes homepage