Jennifer Tour Chayes, Managing Director of Microsoft Research New England and Microsoft Research New York City, will deliver a public lecture titled “Age of Networks” at HHMI’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, VA.

Chayes will speak on Wednesday, February 20, 2013, at 7 PM. The lecture, part of an ongoing series called “Dialogues of Discovery at Janelia Farm,” is free and open to the public, but tickets are required for admission. Directions for obtaining tickets are available on the Janelia Farm web site at www.janelia.org/events. Seating is limited to 250 people. Doors will open at 6:30 PM.

“Everywhere we turn these days, we find that networks can be used to describe relevant interactions,” said Chayes. “In the high-tech world, we see the Internet, the World Wide Web, mobile phone networks, and a variety of online social networks.  In economics, we are increasingly experiencing both the positive and negative effects of a global networked economy.  In problems of world health, distribution of limited resources, such as water, quickly becomes a problem of finding the optimal network for resource allocation.  In this talk, I will discuss some of the models we are using to describe these networks.”

Chayes is one of the world’s experts in the modeling and analysis of random, dynamically growing graphs—which are used to model the Internet, the World Wide Web and a host of other technological and social networks. Among Chayes’ contributions to Microsoft technologies are 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.

Chayes is Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director of Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which she co-founded in July 2008, and Microsoft Research New York City, which she co-founded in 2012. Before this, she was Research Area Manager for Mathematics, Theoretical Computer Science and Cryptography at Microsoft Research Redmond. Chayes joined Microsoft Research in 1997, when she co-founded the Theory Group. Her research areas include phase transitions in discrete mathematics and computer science, structural and dynamical properties of self-engineered networks, and algorithmic game theory. She is the co-author of over 100 scientific papers and the co-inventor of more than 25 patents.

Chayes has many ties to the academic community. She was for many years Professor of Mathematics at UCLA. She 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, the Advisory Boards of the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science, the U.S. National Committee for Mathematics, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Selection Committee for the Anita Borg Award for Technical Leadership. 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 received her B.A. in biology and physics at Wesleyan University, where she graduated first in her class, and her Ph.D. in mathematical physics at Princeton. She did her postdoctoral work in the mathematics and physics departments at Harvard and Cornell. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. She has twice been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Chayes is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association of Computing Machinery and the Fields Institute, and a National Associate of the National Academies.

Recent speakers in the “Dialogues of Discovery” series have included Eric Betzig, a lab head at Janelia; Sir Paul Nurse, President of The Royal Society; Karel Svoboda, a lab head at Janelia; Roger Perlmutter, former Executive Vice President for Research and Development at Amgen, Inc.; Leslie Vosshall, HHMI investigator at The Rockefeller University; and Sean B. Carroll, HHMI vice president for Science Education.