The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology announced today that Jennifer Chayes, Distinguished Scientist and Managing Director of Microsoft Research New England, has been selected to receive the Women of Vision Leadership Award. Founded in 1997 by renowned computer scientist Anita Borg, the institute provides resources and programs to help industry, academia, and government recruit, retain, and develop women leaders in high-tech fields, resulting in higher levels of technological innovation.
The annual Women of Vision Leadership Award recognizes a leading technical woman who has led an important technology development or innovation, made a significant contribution to the technology industry, and inspires others. Women recognized in prior years have included the first female fellow at a major technology company, a lawyer who helped create the Mozilla Foundation, and the creator of technology that enables the visually disabled to use computers.
“Jennifer Chayes is the Women of Vision Award winner in the Leadership category. She is recognized for her work based on the impact she has had on computer science through her leadership in building research communities that bridge theoretical computer science, mathematics, physics, statistics, economics and computational biology. Through her founding and leadership of the theory group at Microsoft Research, and more recently the Microsoft Research New England lab, she has influenced and mentored hundreds of researchers. In her own research she has spearheaded extremely important foundational work on dynamic random networks in theoretical computer science. “ – Anita Borg Institute, February 28th, 2012
The Anita Borg Institute is also honoring two other leading technical women including S. Revi Sterling, Director, ICTD Graduate Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, with the Social Impact award and Sarita V. Adve, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with the Innovation award.
Congratulations to Jennifer and her fellow award winners on their outstanding contributions to computer science and society.
