Women Leaders at Work: Untold Tales of Women Achieving Their Ambitions by Elizabeth Ghaffari

Author:Elizabeth Ghaffari
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Women in Business, Leadership, Management, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781430237297
Publisher: Apress
Published: 2011-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Jennifer Tour Chayes

Managing Director, Microsoft Research New England

Born 1956 in New York, New York.

Dr. Jennifer Tour Chayes is Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director of Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she co-founded in 2008 with her husband, Christian Borgs, to integrate mathematics and computer science with other applied sciences.

Dr. Chayes' research concentration has been in the areas of phase transitions in discrete mathematics and computer science, structural and dynamical properties of self-engineered networks, and algorithmic game theory. She has led research teams in developing innovative solutions in economics and social media, new drug therapies for cancer, and energy conservation in the context of cloud computing.

In 1997, at the invitation of Nathan Myhrvold, then chief technology officer of Microsoft, Dr. Chayes joined Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, and co-founded its Theory Group to collaborate with academics and researchers on fundamental problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science. While in Redmond, she was also an affiliate professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Prior to Microsoft, Dr. Chayes was a professor of mathematics at UCLA, where she taught undergraduate and graduate students. During her tenure, she received the Distinguished Teaching Award, an honor awarded by the faculty of the university's math department.

Dr. Chayes has co-authored more than one hundred scientific papers and co-invented more than twenty-five patents. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study; a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a National Associate of the National Academies; a fellow of the Fields Institute; and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Serving on numerous institute boards, advisory committees, and editorial boards, she is the chair of the Turing Award Selection Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, past chair of the Mathematics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and past vice president of the American Mathematical Society.

She received her BA in biology and physics from Wesleyan University in 1979, graduating first in her class. She received her PhD in mathematical physics at Princeton University in 1983, and did postdoctoral work in the mathematics and physics departments at Harvard and Cornell. She received a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Sloan Faculty Fellowship.

In June 2011, Dr. Chayes was recognized with the annual Leadership Award of Cambridge-based Women Entrepreneurs in Science and Technology.

Elizabeth Ghaffari: I've heard some stories about your early interest in math and would like to get a feel for your family as you were growing up—your siblings or any of the influences that might have directed you into the math and physics arena.

Dr. Jennifer Tour Chayes: I've always loved math, although I'm not sure why. There wasn't a lot of math done in my house when I was growing up. Two of the three of us siblings are pretty well-known scientists, but I'm not sure where this came from. There must have been something in the gene pool somewhere.

I was born in Manhattan, raised in Riverdale, the Bronx, and then we moved to White Plains when I was three.

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