Dean Jennifer Tour Chayes

Jennifer Tour Chayes is the founding Dean of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) at the University of California, Berkeley — the institutional home most likely to host CalCompute under the terms of SB-53. A mathematical physicist and theoretical computer scientist of global distinction, Chayes is one of the world’s leading experts on phase transitions, network theory, and algorithmic game theory.

Chayes grew up in White Plains, New York, the child of Iranian immigrants. She earned her bachelor’s degree in biology and physics from Wesleyan University, graduating first in her class, and her PhD in mathematical physics from Princeton University. After postdoctoral work at Harvard and Cornell, she became a tenured mathematics professor at UCLA in 1987. In 1997, she left academia to co-found the Theory Group at Microsoft Research, and later founded Microsoft Research New England (2008) and Microsoft Research New York City (2012), leading both labs as Managing Director for over two decades. She joined UC Berkeley in 2022 to launch CDSS.

At Berkeley, Chayes has built the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society as an explicitly interdisciplinary institution — one that integrates technical computing research with social science, ethics, and public-interest applications. This vision directly parallels CalCompute’s mandate to advance AI that is safe, ethical, equitable, and sustainable.

Following Governor Newsom’s veto of SB-1047 in September 2024, Chayes joined Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Dr. Fei-Fei Li as a co-author of the California AI working group report published in March 2025. The report provided the empirical and policy framework that shaped SB-53. At the bill’s signing on September 29, 2025, Chayes co-signed the joint statement affirming the law’s alignment with the working group’s “trust but verify” principles.

Chayes is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Mathematical Society, and the Fields Institute. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 and received the SIAM John von Neumann Lecture Prize in 2015. She has authored nearly 120 scientific papers and holds more than 25 patents. As dean of Berkeley’s CDSS — the UC campus most directly relevant to CalCompute’s statutory home within the University of California system — Chayes is a central institutional figure in the initiative’s future.