Jennifer Chayes

Jennifer Tour Chayes is Dean of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society at UC Berkeley. Jennifer led the establishment of this college – the first new college at Berkeley in more than 50 years. She is also Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Information, Mathematics, and Statistics. Before joining Berkeley in 2020, Jennifer was Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where she led research programs for more than 20 years and was founder and managing director of three interdisciplinary labs: Microsoft Research New England, New York City, and Montreal. These labs were focused on core computing and AI and the interface of computing with many other fields, including mathematics, physics, biomedicine, economics, and social sciences. Before joining Microsoft, she was Professor of Mathematics at UCLA.

Jennifer is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the 2015 John von Neumann Prize from the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She has authored more than 150 scientific papers in mathematics, physics, computer science, economics, biology, and chemistry and is the co-inventor of 30 patents. She earned her Ph.D. in mathematical physics at Princeton University and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Leiden University in the Netherlands. 

Jennifer’s research areas include phase transitions in computer science and structural and dynamical properties of networks, including modeling and graph algorithms. She is one of the inventors of the field of graphons, which are widely used for 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. Most recently, she has been focusing on the use of generative AI in the creation of materials for carbon capture.