Jennifer Chayes to be awarded honorary doctorate from Bard College

CS Prof. Jennifer Chayes, the Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science (CDSS) and the Dean of the School of Information, will be awarded an honorary doctorate from Bard College in New York on May 28th.   Chayes is 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, and is a world expert in the modeling and analysis of dynamically growing graphs.  Her recent work focuses on machine learning, including both theory and applications in cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision making, and climate change.  Chayes earned her B.A. in Biology and Physics from Wesleyan in 1979  and her Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics from Princeton in 1983.  She served as a professor of Mathematics at UCLA for over ten years before leaving to co-found the Theory Group at Microsoft Research Redmond in 1997.  She opened Microsoft Research New England in 2008, where she served as Managing Director until she left for Berkeley in 2020.