Credit: Mark Ostow

When Jennifer Chayes left her job at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1997 to become a researcher at Microsoft's labs in Redmond, she declared that it would take 100 years for her academic work to find real-world applications. But as managing director of the newly announced Microsoft Research New England lab in Cambridge, MA, she has parlayed her background in mathe­matical physics into research with broad implications for today's Internet.

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