Jennifer Chayes is Dean of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, where she holds appointments as Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics, and Information. In Computer Science, her research focuses on phase transitions, structural and dynamical properties of networks including modeling and graph algorithms, and machine learning theory and applications, such as in cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision-making, climate change, and generative AI for materials in carbon capture. She is one of the inventors of graphons, widely used for machine learning on large-scale networks. Chayes earned her B.A. in Biology and Physics from Wesleyan University in 1979, graduating first in her class summa cum laude, and her Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics from Princeton University in 1983. She completed postdoctoral fellowships in mathematics and physics at Harvard University and Cornell University.

Chayes began her academic career as Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1987, advancing to full Professor in 1990, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award. From 1997 to 2020, she held leadership roles at Microsoft Research, including Technical Fellow, and as founder and Managing Director of interdisciplinary labs in New England, New York City, and Montreal, bridging computing with mathematics, physics, biomedicine, economics, and social sciences. Since joining Berkeley in 2020, she has led the establishment of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, the first new college in over 50 years. She has authored over 150 scientific papers and co-invented more than 30 patents. Key publications include "Tackling climate change with machine learning" (2022), "Maximizing social influence in nearly optimal time" (2014), "Entropy-SGD: Biasing gradient descent into wide valleys" (2019), and "Convergent sequences of dense graphs I: Subgraph frequencies, metric properties and testing" (2008). Her honors include the SIAM John von Neumann Prize (2015), membership in the National Academy of Sciences (2019) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014), ACM Distinguished Service Award (2020), and honorary doctorates from Leiden University (2016) and Bard College (2022). She has served as editor for journals including SIAM Review, Harvard Data Science Review, and Combinatorics, Probability and Computing.

Professional Email: jchayes@berkeley.edu