Kathryn S. McKinley is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google (2017-present). She received her BA, MS, and PhD from Rice University. Her research interests span programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, operating systems, cloud systems, and architecture with a focus on performance, parallelism, and memory systems. She and her collaborators have produced software systems widely used in industry and academia: the DaCapo Java Benchmarks (31,800+ downloads), the TRIPS Compiler, the Hoard memory manager (used by OS X), the MMTk memory management toolkit, the Immix garbage collector (used by Jikes RVM, Haxe, Rubinius, and Scala), and the SHIM profiler.

Dr. McKinley is an IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow. Her research has garnered Test-of-Time awards (ASPLOS, OOPSLA (2), SIGMETRICS, ICS), best paper awards (Middlewear, ASPLOS), IEEE MICRO Top Picks awards (4), SIGPLAN Research Highlights, NVMW Memorable Paper, and CACM Research Highlights (2). Dr. McKinley was honored to testify to the House Science Committee (Feb. 14, 2013). She served as CRA-W co-chair. She has graduated 22 PhD students. She and her husband have three sons.