Kathryn S. McKinley is a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where she designs systems that deliver capacity elasticity for Google Cloud customers and efficiency for Google. She leads teams that focus on resource management and provisioning infrastructure to produce industry leading price performance products that use Google and the world’s resources wisely. Her expertise spans cloud and parallel systems, with a focus on memory systems.

Prior to joining Google, she was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft and an Endowed Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research groups produced technologies that influenced industry and academia, including the DaCapo Java Benchmarks and benchmarking methodologies; Hoard, the first scalable and probably memory efficient memory manager, still in wide use, including by IBM and Apple’s OS X; and Immix, the first mark-region high performance garbage collection family, also in wide use by Jikes RVM, Haxe, Rubinius, Scala, and others.

Kathryn is passionate about inclusion and equity in computing. In 2018, she co-founded ACM CARES committees, a new type of resource to combat sexual harassment and discrimination in the computing research community. She served as a Computing Research Association (CRA) board member and a CRA Widening Participation board member and co-chair. She continues to participate in and lead programs to increase the participation of women and other under-represented groups in computing. Her service has been recognized with the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award, the ACM SIGARCH Alan B. Berenbaum Distinguished Service Award, and the CRA Distinguished Service Award.

Kathryn is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, an IEEE Fellow, and an ACM Fellow. Her research excellence has been further recognized by numerous test-of-time awards, best paper awards, and several CACM Research Highlight selections. Kathryn was thrilled to receive the SIGPLAN Programming Achievement Award in 2023.