Kathryn S. McKinley is a Principal Research Scientist at Google, where she designs engineering systems customized to GCE customer workloads for performance and a transparent capacity experience. She leads teams that focus on infrastructure for 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 technologies. Prior to joining Google she was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft, and an Endowed Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where her research groups produced technologies that influenced industry and academia. For instance, they produced the industry leading DaCapo Java Benchmarks and benchmarking methodologies; Hoard, the first scalable and probably memory efficient memory manager, adopted by IBM and Apple’s OS X; and Immix, the first of a novel mark-region high performance garbage collection family, in use by Jikes RVM, Haxe, Rubinius, Scala, and others.

Her research excellence has been recognized by numerous test-of-time and best paper awards. She is an IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow. 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 As a Computing Research Association (CRA) board member and CRA-WP board member and co-chair, she participates in and leads programs to increase the participation of women and under-represented groups in computing.