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. By the time I was four or five years old, I had found some neighbors who did math, and I would go over there and ask for math problems—which is kind of a strange thing to seek out. My brothers were going to the same house and asking for candy, yet I was going there asking for math problems.

Ghaffari: How many brothers did you have, and where did you fit in the hierarchy?

Chayes: I'm the oldest—a very typical oldest child. I have two brothers who are close in age. One brother is a year younger than I am, while the other is three years younger. The former is a lawyer, and the latter is a prominent scientist. He's a very well-known chemist—James Tour. He won the Feynman Award and was also one of the ten most-quoted chemists of the last decade.

Ghaffari: What about your parents?

Chayes: My parents are both Persian. My father is a pharmacist, and my mom is a housewife. My father used to do little experiments for us when we were kids. He'd bring stuff home from the drugstore and mix up chemicals, which we found exciting.

Ghaffari: How did you come to choose Wesleyan?

Chayes: At the time I started in 1974, Wesleyan was known more for liberal arts than for sciences. It has very good sciences, but it was known more as a liberal arts school. Actually, it was kind of a hippie school in the early seventies, which I liked. Also, a leftover feature from the sixties was the fact that there were no distribution requirements. I'm really not very good at doing what I'm told—I don't like to have a lot of rules telling me what I'm supposed to do. So, with no requirements, I could build whatever curriculum interested me. I could do whatever I wanted. Even though it was very liberal, artsy school, I ended up taking only two non-science or non-math classes during my entire undergraduate career.

Ghaffari: And I understand that you potentially could have had three majors—biology, physics, and chemistry. Is that right?

Chayes: And math too, actually. I was a physics major and a biology major, with just one course shy of a chemistry major and one course shy of a math major.

Ghaffari: After graduating first in your class, you immediately went on to Princeton University. Why did you choose Princeton?

Chayes: Princeton was supposed to be a great place for doing mathematical physics, so since I loved physics and math, it just seemed like the perfect fit. Our class was very small, just twenty students, so we were all close. We interacted socially as well as in our work. One of my classmates was Nathan Myhrvold, who went on to become chief strategist and chief technology officer of Microsoft Corporation.

Ghaffari: You met your first husband, Lincoln Chayes, at Wesleyan. Is that right?

Chayes: Yes, I married him while I was at Wesleyan. I was nineteen. It was a weird thing to do in 1976, to get married at that young age, but we just decided to do that. We were married for fifteen years, went through undergrad and graduate school and two postdocs together. We got tenure together, and then we split up.

Ghaffari: After Princeton, you did postdoctoral work at Harvard and Cornell. What fellowships were those?

Chayes: From 1983 to 1985, we were at Harvard, the first year in physics, the second year jointly in physics and math. In 1985 to 1987, we were at Cornell, the first year in physics, and the second year jointly again in physics and math. It was the typical postdoc work through the university, but then in the second year at Harvard, I got a National Science Foundation postdoctoral grant, which I took with me to Cornell. Then I added an Army Math Fellowship while at Cornell. The Army had a mathematics center at Cornell.

Ghaffari: Was your transition to UCLA for your work or your husband's work?

Chayes: I guess it was for the both of us—all of our work was joint. We joined the UCLA math department faculty in July 1987. They gave tenure to both of us immediately in 1987, so we never had to do a tenure track, which was nice. We both became full professors in 1990. UCLA has a very good math department, so it was a great environment for us.

I taught undergrad and graduate students there. I ended up teaching a lot of freshman- and sophomore-level courses for non-math majors who needed some concentration in mathematics. Every fall I had about five hundred students, including engineers, mathematicians, and physicists. I'd teach two classes of two hundred and fifty students. I liked teaching the undergrads—that was fun because, if you taught them well, you could get them to love math.

Ghaffari: I guess you taught them well—you won the Distinguished Teaching Award from the math department, right?

Chayes: I liked to teach. You're judged based on student evaluations, and I probably had thousands of those. So, it seemed that the students liked my teaching. The department voted on giving awards to faculty members who had very good teaching recommendations.

Ghaffari: Was there a scarcity of young girls in the UCLA math classes?

Chayes: Oh yes. That was no different from anywhere else I had seen. There probably are more young women in the undergraduate math classes there today. In the four years that I was at Princeton, there was no other woman who got a PhD in math or physics.

Ghaffari: What attracted you to Microsoft and why did you go there?

Chayes: The most important factor was that Nathan Myhrvold made a huge pitch. He's very good at recruitment! At the beginning, I thought it was a really strange thing when he encouraged me to go there. I knew very little about computers. I didn't use computers. I had taken one Fortran class back in 1975, and that was the extent of what I knew about computers. I knew discrete math very well and had begun doing some work that might relate in some way to computer science.

I was looking at a particular problem, and Nathan got it into his head that it would be great if I went to Microsoft and started a group. I thought he was crazy, but I visited Microsoft. I remember my reaction was, “Okay, there are interesting people here.” Also, I like to build things.

At UCLA, even though I was tenured, I was still a young faculty member. I wanted interdisciplinary work and had managed to get UCLA to hire some people who did some interdisciplinary work, but I had dreams of forming interdisciplinary groups. It's hard to get an academic system to turn around, especially from that lowly position.

Nathan basically said, “Okay, if you come to Microsoft, we'll give you positions. We'll let you do whatever you want, build whatever kind of group you want.” That, to me, was pretty compelling. Most of my colleagues in academia thought I was crazy, because it sounded very risky. And Microsoft sounded like a bizarre place for a pure mathematical physicist to go. But it just seemed interesting to me, and when I visited there, I really liked the people. I thought, “Okay, I have a vision. I say I want to build things, and here somebody is offering me the chance to do that. I should take it.”

Chayes: I moved to Microsoft in '97, but I didn't officially leave UCLA until '99.

Ghaffari: What was the problem that you were working on that interested Myhrvold?

Chayes: Most of the time, I was working on phase transitions—when a substance changes its state or phase from, say, water to ice or water to steam or from one crystal structure to another. But I was also working on problems of phase transitions in intractable problems, such as resource-allocation challenges. For example, situations where you have resources but you also have constraints.

A good example is when you're trying to schedule flights. The number of airlines is one given. The resources are your planes and gas. Another consideration is the number of passengers who want to go from one place to another in a given period of time. Those are the constraints. If you have lots of resources and very few constraints, then it's easy to solve the problem. If you have lots of constraints and very few resources, then there's no solution.

It turns out that there's a critical ratio of constraints to resources such that when you pass through that window—when the number of constraints relative to resources is large—you go from the system being solvable to the system being unsolvable. I was studying that in much the same way that a mathematical physicist would study a phase transition in a magnet or a liquid-to-gas transition. Nathan thought this was very cool and interesting, and he said that I should come study this at Microsoft. When I was interviewing, I couldn't see the relevance, but they did—or at least Nathan did. So they hired me.

Ghaffari: You co-founded, with Christian Borgs, the Theory Group, as a framework for interdisciplinary research.

Chayes: Right. That was the thing they let me build, and we called it “theory” because it was such a general name. It included math, physics, and theoretical computer science. Pretty much, it included anything you could do with a pencil and a piece of paper.

Ghaffari: Where did you meet Christian Borgs?

Chayes: In 1984, I attended the six-week physics summer school/conference held just outside of Chamonix in the Swiss Alps, called Les Houches. It's a mathematical physics summer school attended by everyone from new PhDs up through very established professors. The French government runs the conferences, focusing on a wide variety of physics topics. In Europe, the governments typically run and fund these schools. It was a natural thing for me to do at that time, given that I was on the mathematical physics track.

I actually met a great many people at that summer school. Many of the professional colleagues I've come to know throughout all these years, internationally especially, were people I met at that summer school, including my husband, Christian Borgs. We knew each other as colleagues, but didn't get together as a couple until 1992.

Ghaffari: You seem to have produced a tremendous volume of articles that you have co-authored with him. Would you say you collaborate well together?

Chayes: Yes, definitely. The way I manage to have a personal life and work life is to combine them because I get really involved in my work. If I had a spouse who did something different, I would never see him. This is my work–life balance.

Ghaffari: Who leads? Who initiates the research or article topic? Is it you, is it him, is it both?

Chayes: Well, I think it's both. I think these decisions certainly involve collaboration. I tend to jump into things first. I make leaps. But then he's very deep and sees the connections. So, I think we're a good pair that way. When it gets really tough, he's right there. It might take him a little longer to understand a problem, but then he's got great depth and phenomenal comprehension.

I like to think about things in a metaphorical way, so I will see analogies from one field to another field, or I might think that tapping some discipline or approach from one field might be appropriate for another field. It's almost an intuitive kind of thing. So, it's useful to have somebody you work with closely who understands your thinking and with whom you can discuss these things on a very deep level.

Ghaffari: What happened first? Were you the co-founder of the Theory Group or were you an area regional manager for Microsoft?

Chayes: First, I co-founded the Theory Group, and then about six or seven years ago, as Microsoft Research grew, the company instituted an extra layer of management in which there were research area managers who typically managed their own groups and then some other groups as well. I began managing the Crypto Group and oversaw other theoretical areas as well.

Ghaffari: What would you say would be your primary achievements at each level?

Chayes: I think of my achievements as twofold. There are the personal research achievements, and then there's the building of something that maybe helps to inspire other researchers. In both cases, it's a matter of bringing together different fields.

For example, a new branch of probability was formed in our lab, the Theory Group, by bringing together some complex analysis and probability theory. Six years ago, the Fields Medal was given to one of the researchers who participated in this. The Fields Medal is like the Nobel Prize in mathematics. That's just one example within math of bringing together different disciplines that nobody had thought to merge in the past and yet, I'm sure, one hundred years from now, people will still be studying the new field which emerged.

I'm proudest of melding together these different disciplines. And the things for which I'm best known are probably these interdisciplinary endeavors—merging different approaches like the physics of phase transitions and computation, or bringing physics and computation to the biomedical field. These are definite interdisciplinary achievements.

Now, too, after all these years, I think I'm known for being a mentor to the postdoctoral students I've worked with over the past decade. Today, they are now faculty at essentially every top university, at most of the top twenty academic places in the world. Mentoring young people, recognizing which young people are really good and helping them to develop, represents a very satisfying personal achievement.

Ghaffari: Would you say Nathan Myhrvold was a mentor?

Chayes: No, Nathan was not a mentor—we are friends. But he was someone who recognized what was possible for me at Microsoft. He was more of a visionary, both for me and for others. Another amazing friend is Maria Klawe.¹ We are best friends now, but she was the one who pushed me to look at certain things that I wouldn't have looked at before—women's issues, for example. I really didn't want to get involved in women in science or women in technology endeavors. That's not atypical for my generation because we tend to think, “Well, I did just fine without worrying about this. So why should I worry about it now?” In fact, it's been good for me.

Maria and I talk a great deal these days. A few weeks ago, I spent a weekend with her and her family in California. We talked through a lot of problems, challenges that we've both experienced. For example, both of us tend to say exactly what's on our minds. Sometimes, we have to extract our feet from our mouths. Maria really helps me to understand how to learn from mistakes—which is one of her greatest strengths and indeed one of the greatest strengths of many amazing leaders.

Ghaffari: How did you first meet Dr. Maria Klawe?

Chayes: She came to Microsoft to ask for money for the University of British Columbia. We went out to dinner with her—we had many mutual friends. She likes to say—this is probably true—we didn't like each other that much the first time we met. She says we were like two Type A personalities clashing. I mean, I didn't know she didn't like me, and she didn't know I didn't like her, but we knew we didn't like the other one that much.

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Then, a couple of years later, in the summer of 2001, we were at a theoretical computer science conference together in Crete. She was with her husband, Nick, who is a mathematician and theoretical computer scientist, and I was with my husband, Christian. We ended up talking all evening—probably until five in the morning. We realized we had lots of similarities—it was just uncanny the number of similar things we had done over the years or our shared reactions to things. Now, she tells people that I am her sister. We became and continue to be very good friends.

She introduced me to the Anita Borg² people. At first, I didn't understand why I should go to the conferences that they ran, so Maria basically dragged me kicking and screaming to a Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing event. After that, I discovered I liked them and became very involved. I've sat on various committees for them and have done other things with them over the years.

Ghaffari: What made you decide to head back to the East Coast to found the New England research center—Microsoft East?

Chayes: Well, I wanted a challenge—a change. This is another characteristic I have. When most people would just start feeling comfortable, I start feeling bored. When I'm not feeling I'm in over my head, I very quickly start feeling bored. It's strange because when I am in over my head, I say to myself, “Oh, why did I do this to myself?” But, then, I start feeling good about it. Anyway, I just wondered what the next challenge was going to be.

I was looking at Microsoft's business, what research could do for Microsoft, and how we defined research. I saw that we were defining research basically to be computer science and mathematical sciences only. We were not yet including a lot about the social sciences, yet the business was very much moving in the direction of social sciences, including economics and business models.

In the past, companies would just think about the technology and slap some business model on top of that. But, if you thought thoroughly about building the technology, you had to consider “What is the business model?” Then you had to include other social aspects. How do people use technology? What are their explicit needs? What are needs they may not even realize they have?

I saw that there were disciplines that were just starting to form at the boundaries of social sciences and the more mathematical sciences—computer sciences and mathematics. I though there needed to be a combination of the mathematical and socials sciences, and also with design—considering design as an academic as well as applied discipline.

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I knew very little about these other areas of inquiry. I started to do a little bit of work in economics and thought about trying to build an economics group in Redmond. I became frustrated because I talked to some of the top economists in the world, and they didn't seem interested in relocating to Redmond, whereas I had been able to get some of the top mathematicians in the world when I started a mathematics group. It turned out that economists were fairly well entrenched in certain areas, one of which was Cambridge due to the confluence of MIT and Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research, as well as a host of other strong universities.

It seemed that if I wanted to attract the very top people in economics, then it would be much easier to do it in Cambridge. The same was true in the social sciences—there's the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, which started out as part of Harvard Law School. It was a combination of lawyers and technologists who, in the past couple of years, started to be a university-wide institute. There's the Media Lab at MIT. There are all these social scientists with whom it seemed it would be very interesting to interact.

I just thought, “Okay, if I come here and get really smart, open-minded computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists and put them together with smart anthropologists, smart sociologists, smart economists, then maybe something interesting will happen.” So I pitched the idea, showing why I thought Microsoft needed expertise in these areas. I talked about where technology was moving and where Microsoft would want to be moving. I presented the argument about the kinds of people who were located in Cambridge who wouldn't relocate. Surprisingly, it took just a few weeks actually for Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to say “yes” to the idea. It all happened very quickly.

Ghaffari: Was the idea to set up the New England Research Center largely your initiative or Christian's, would you say?

Chayes: I think this one was more my initiative. Christian was very happy. He was doing well, and we had a great team at the Theory Group. We had wonderful friends and a wonderful house. He said, “What's the matter with you?” I replied, “This is something more, something new and different. Let's do this.” I definitely think it was more my impetus.

Realistically, I don't think it would have happened without him. I don't tend to take vacations. He forces me to take vacations. He also forces me to unplug and get rid of my phone for a couple of weeks. It was at the end of one of those vacations—while we were on the Greek Isles—that I thought of this. I came home, wrote up a few pages and started circulating it. People went for it.

Christian enforces the idea that we need to have the space to think about these things, which I think is very important in principle. Even so, I never want to slow down, so he constantly needs to remind me that strategic thinking requires space.

Ghaffari: Are you including anything from the neuroscience fields, such as neuroeconomics research?

Chayes: We're still just thinking about neuro-economics. Interestingly, I was surprised when so many people from the biomedical sciences came to us for help. I should have expected that since Cambridge is the biotech capital of the world, like Silicon Valley is the tech capital of the world. There are literally hundreds of biomedical companies in the area, and all the major drug companies have research outlets here.

Many biotech and biology people came asking for help, so we're now doing some of the physics-inspired algorithms in the context of biomedical problems like gene regulatory networks for cancer. We've started talking with other people who are trying to understand the wiring diagram of the brain. There are many problems of a highly mathematical nature in those fields. They tend to be “messy” in the ways that biology problems can be messy, but they're also, at their heart, really problems of extremely large data sets. We try to understand what the underlying network is in that data set, so that you can make sense of it and, for example, develop drug targets for cancers.

That clearly is an area where we are building some expertise now, adding both postdocs and other collaborators. We don't have somebody in every field in which we're interested. I would like to get behavioral economists and psychologists more involved and at some point that would include neuroeconomists.

Ghaffari: Are you finding the phase transition models have applicability to a lot of the healthcare fields?

Chayes: Absolutely. All of these techniques that we're developing—where we're getting very good results—are based on the fundamental understanding we got from looking at highly constrained systems at the points of their phase transitions.

The algorithms that we're using as we work with Sloan-Kettering trying to come up with drug targets for glioblastoma, which is brain cancer, or ovarian cancer or prostate cancer—all of them are based on studying these phase transitions. Sometimes I find that simply mind-blowing—the scale and variety of things that come out of something that appeared, a priori, to be so unrelated.

We are simply trying to follow where the science takes us. Today, it's taken us to a place where the algorithms that we've developed to this point are probably more powerful than any existing algorithms in solving optimization problems on certain types of very large data sets.

Ghaffari: danah boyd³ is one example of your group's new emphasis on social networking issues. Is that right?

Chayes: Yes, absolutely. danah is amazing. For years, she has studied “the tribe” represented by US teenagers, which is an incredibly different tribe from their parents. We have had a lot of phenomenal visitors in that space, and we are actually planning on hiring more researchers who understand these social phenomena from an anthropological viewpoint, how different cultures emerge and express themselves through the use of different technologies.

US teenagers have very different social norms around things like privacy and friendship. Understanding where that comes from is extremely important. Many people talk about this, but danah actually goes out and conducts hundreds of interviews with teenagers. Her fieldwork last fall took her to different cities and different socioeconomic backgrounds, studying the ways in which teenagers use technology—how they perceive privacy, friendship and bullying. Her in-depth interviews back up her analysis. Her work is very highly cited because there isn't that much substantive research out there, and hers is truly brilliant.

We have another woman here, Kate Crawford, who's visiting from Sydney, Australia. She advises the government down there about social networks, just as danah is advising the government here about them. You begin to see both similarities and huge cultural differences. Kate just came back from rural India, studying the ways people there use technology.

These are intriguing issues. I find it especially interesting to bring such people together with more mathematical people like me. I have worked on models of social networks and recommendation systems that exist in social networks. When I talk to danah, I'm trying to understand what people are seeking through recommendation systems. When you merge qualitative and quantitative skill sets, it takes a while for each to adapt to the other because there are language barriers and differences in what we're trying to achieve. When we finally do achieve something jointly, I find that it's usually very good and very deep.

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Ghaffari: Do you see danah or Kate's work being spun off as a separate center, or do you think it can be accommodated within the Microsoft Center in New England?

Chayes: I believe it is very important that we do not spin these research areas off into different centers. These fields tend to be a bit like oil and water. We work constantly, on a daily basis, to try to make sure that we are mixing them up, toward the goal of getting a really good emulsion. I think we can gain many more benefits if we have that bigger surface area.

Large companies have many advantages. One advantage is that we can fund large research centers. We can look beyond the very short term. We can bring together very different disciplines. If we work hard to ensure that people are talking to each other, understanding each other's values and interacting, then we're going to achieve things that cannot be achieved in separate isolated centers.

Microsoft does not have “lablets”—a little lab in multiple cities—as many other companies do. Part of that goes back to Nathan's and Bill's philosophy of finding a critical mass for research. I do believe that you get something unique when you have that critical mass. But you can't just let people separate by disciplines because then you end up with the very siloed structure of a university.

You can get amazing things done in a university, but there's no reason for Microsoft to get into the university business. It's cheaper for us to go and fund selected university research or buy some intellectual property from a university. In our own research centers, we can create something by blurring these boundaries—a university usually can't do that as well.

Ghaffari: How does Microsoft benefit from the research conducted in the New England center? How does your work fit into the Microsoft brand?

Chayes: Microsoft owns all of the intellectual property—IP—produced by our lab. Some of our research goes directly into products.

For example, in less than three years—which is quite fast—our lab shipped its first product, the Readmissions Manager, which is now part of our hospital database product, Amalga. The Readmissions Manager helps healthcare organizations improve operations, reduce costs, and increase patient satisfaction by identifying the root causes of preventable hospital readmissions.

Through machine learning analysis of admissions patterns, developed in our lab, this product provides proactive identification of patients who are at high risk for repeat admissions, so that hospital workers can implement the most effective actions to reduce preventable readmissions. The readmissions manager uses data from the patients ER visit, and from databases of thousands of previous visits, to address whether the patient is likely to be readmitted in the next thirty days—very important, since Medicare is planning to institute a policy of not paying for patients who are readmitted.

Some of the work produced in our lab has more of an impact on long-term strategy than on products directly. For example, our empirical economics program produces analyses of current and possible alternative business models for online services, which informs our executives and, therefore, may change the course of the company's business and product planning.

Thus, the work in our lab can impact many Microsoft business units, from online services—where machine learning, social media, and empirical economics have profound effects, to cloud services—where our algorithms help to improve efficiency both environmentally and economically, and to Windows—where our security and cryptography work has an impact. There are many more examples.

Although Microsoft owns the IP developed by the lab, we make most of it freely available for non-commercial use. In fact, there are thousands of academic papers which have built on the work coming out of my groups at Microsoft Research over the past fourteen years. Our groups themselves have produced lots of fantastic ideas and papers, but just as important is the foundation the work has laid for further work in the international academic community. Microsoft Research believes that it is important. In fact, one of our missions is to facilitate such work. For all those reasons, Microsoft makes our IP freely available for non-commercial purposes.

Ghaffari: Are you intentionally changing the name of the Microsoft New England Center to be the NERD Center?

Chayes: Yes, we do officially market ourselves as the NERD Center, which stands for New England Research and Development. Microsoft Research New England is the R in “NERD.” There are some wonderful development groups here. For example, there's the SharePoint Workspace group which is part of Office, and there is the Application Virtualization group that is a product group within our Server and Tools business. There are other groups working on the Xbox. So we have some dev groups here and then we have research. We used the name NERD as a joke at first, and then we said, “Well, why not?” It certainly is memorable, isn't it?

Ghaffari: How have you dealt with the demands of work and family?

Chayes: Christian has a son, Claudio, who lived with us for a while when he was growing up. He's twenty-seven now and is a lawyer in Germany. He lived with us in Washington State for a while when he was in high school.

So I have done some parenting. When Claudio moved in with us, he wasn't doing well in school, which is why his mom sent him overseas. I would go over his homework with him every day, making him finish his homework and show it to me. He'd say, “You can't do this to a sixteen-year-old!” Or he'd say, “You can't ground me because you're going to speak at a conference in Italy.” And I would say, “Watch me!” I would cancel the conference in Italy, and I would ground him.

His grades went way up. It was just so much easier to get all As than to deal with me—especially because he's very smart. It worked out really well. In a very short period of time, he realized I was at least as stubborn as he was. After that, we were just fine. That was fun, and I think he enjoyed it, too, in the end. Although at the time, he wasn't so sure.

I have a lot of graduate students and postdocs I've mentored over the years. It's starting to feel very much as if they were my children. But, it's almost as if I'm a different species because their “generation time” with me as students was only about four years, so I have great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren from all the people I've mentored. It's kind of cool. They're all sending me their kids and then their kids' kids. It's become very incestuous—like lab rats, but really smart lab rats.

Ghaffari: Are you still in touch with your mother-in-law, Antonia Chayes?⁴

Chayes: Yes, Toni is great. She's wonderful. She was my mother-in-law for fifteen years, a very influential fifteen years. I met her when I was seventeen, and Lincoln and I split up when I was thirty-two, so she was really a lot like a mom. To a large extent, I grew up in that household because my family didn't have those kinds of ties or careers. I learned a lot from her, and I still realize that there are times at which I'm applying those lessons. She once said to me, “Oh, you took after me possibly more than my own kids took after me.” She was also married at nineteen, but stayed married. And she became an academic.

Ghaffari: How do you guide young women to follow careers in your particular area—how do you motivate and advise them?

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Chayes: I always tell them that they should follow their passion, and I really mean that. I don't think they should try to plan their careers. I think that unplanned careers are so much more interesting than planned careers. If you over-plan, you miss a lot of opportunities. So do something you're passionate about. Work really hard. Don't be afraid of being stupid—ask questions. Mentor other people. And just open your eyes. Don't miss those opportunities. Don't be scared to try things.

Don't be too narrow. Don't think, “Oh, this is too far afield for me,” because the far-afield stuff often is the most exciting. So, I tell them to always keep your eyes open for something that grabs your attention and not to worry that you might not yet be an expert in that field.

A lot of women, including me, are not confident. I sound confident, but often I'm not confident. Maria Klawe introduced me to the concept of an “imposter panel”—something she started doing herself. An imposter panel is where you talk about how you feel like an imposter, in spite of great success. When you put together groups of very impressive, very accomplished women, in different stages of their careers, and have them talk one after another about how they feel like imposters, then you begin to realize that—more important than actually having confidence—is knowing how to act with confidence. You have to take the actions that a confident person would take and just take risks, in spite of this voice inside of you telling you that you are going to fail. It's just a voice. Probably wrong, to boot. So you learn to just take risks and act as if you are confident, especially if you simply think you were just lucky. I think sounding confident is a big part of success.

Ghaffari: Do you feel that the imposter panels were effective tools?

Chayes: Very effective, yes. It even helps me to hear those things although I'm pretty far along right now. A few years ago, I did an imposter panel at MIT with about five hundred women in attendance. I've never seen a bunch of people so energized. As we were talking, it was amazing to see all the heads nodding in affirmation and the shock of realization on the faces in the audience. Nod and shock. “Oh my gosh! Somebody else feels this way?” I think the panels are extremely effective because when you hear that someone else who's very successful with the same discouraging voices in their head, suddenly it occurs to you that maybe—if that person has decided she shouldn't listen to those voices—may I shouldn't listen to them, either.

Ghaffari: Do you think that guys need the same advice?

Chayes: I think that many men do need the same advice, although my experience has been—and there's also a lot of documentation to back this up—that women are truly less confident than men. Over the years, I would see all of these talented women students doing really well in my classes. For example, I would see a woman being the top student among two hundred and fifty people in my class. And I would say to her, “Wow, you know, you seem to be very good at math. Maybe you should think about having a career in math,” and she would say, “Oh, I'm just lucky.”

Then some guys would do badly and would come to my office and tell me why they were just unlucky and how they actually knew so much more than was apparent from their exams. I saw that same pattern again and again and again. I'm not sure why but, in general, women tend to be less confident, so I think they need more encouragement to pursue opportunities in spite of whatever their inner voices might be telling them. Men need this too, but, statistically speaking, women need it more.

Ghaffari: Do you think the social networking that's happening today is fostering this insecurity or resolving it or having any impact whatsoever?

Chayes: I think there are different levels of social networking. To the extent that I understand it, Facebook can foster insecurities because it provides a forum for bullying. In my day, of course there was bullying which fostered insecurity, but it didn't occur on Facebook. For example, when girls were good in math or science, they would often be bullied by both girls and boys who would try to make them feel bad about their achievements and themselves. I know that some of that is taking place online today.

There are other kinds of social networking that are extremely helpful—like mentoring and counseling. Many things that were taking place in other venues are now taking place online, which means that they are just happening at a faster time scale. Both for good and for ill, they're happening at a much quicker pace.

Ghaffari: You're also closer to Harvard and Radcliffe and the work being done there to basically undo the impact of Lawrence Summers' statements to the NBER. Do you see that happening?

Chayes: I'm on the board of the Radcliffe Institute and I have associations with the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard. Yes, some of the damage caused by Larry Summers' statements is certainly being undone—basically by amazing women leaders who have come in, instituted great policies, and also provided fantastic role models. For example, Drew Faust⁵ and Cherry Murray⁶ are incredible leaders.

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Ghaffari: Do you have a vision of where you are going to be yourself in five to ten years?

Chayes: Microsoft Research New England is definitely growing. We have over three hundred short-term visitors a year who spend anywhere from a day to a month per visit. We have a dozen permanent staff members, another dozen two-year postdoc students, and ten sabbatical visitors.

As for myself, I don't know. I'm really torn. I talk to a lot of friends of mine who are university presidents or provosts. On the one hand, I want to run something bigger. On the other hand, I like to be very actively involved as a researcher because I love doing research. More importantly, I think I can also model certain kinds of behaviors that people otherwise might not see.

For example, it's not unusual to hear someone say, “Oh, there's no way you'll get somebody like this to work with somebody like that.” My response is, “Watch me.” And when I model the behavior, I can often get other people involved in the research, and then I can step away. I'm constantly torn about how deeply I want to be personally involved in research and then how much I want to create new research groups.

Over the next five to ten years, I'm sure that I'll be addressing other problems, doing new and interesting projects. For example, I have a great interest in education and lots of opinions about how it could and should be changed.

While the specific vision isn't clear yet, I can tell you that I won't be bored. I'm going to make sure that I won't be bored.