Kathryn S. McKinley

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 ACM Research Highlights, test-of-time, and best paper awards. She is a recipient of the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award and the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Language Software Award. She is an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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 CRA Widening Participation (CRA-WP) co-chair, she founded the CRA Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline. This community and other service has been recognized with the CRA Distinguished Service Award, ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award, and the ACM SIGARCH Alan D. Berenbaum Distinguished Service Award. As a former Computing Research Association (CRA) board member and CRA-WP board member and co-chair, she continues to participate in and lead programs to increase the participation of women and under-represented groups in computing.