Katherine Yelick

Katherine "Kathy" Anne Yelick is an American computer scientist, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Katherine Yelick received her SB, SM, and PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1991. She joined the research staff at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1996 as a joint-appointment faculty research scientist, and has been the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences since 2010. She is known for her work in partitioned global address space programming languages, including co-inventing the Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Titanium languages. She also led the Sparsity project, the first automatically tuned library for sparse matrix kernels, and she co-led the development of the Optimized Sparse Kernel Interface (OSKI). From 2008 tp 2012 she was the director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. From 2009 to 2015 she was a member of the California Council on Science and Technology.

In 2012 she was named as an ACM Fellow "for [her] contributions to parallel computing languages that have been used in both the research community and in production environments." In 2013 she received the ACM-W Athena Lecturer award at SC13. She received the ACM Ken Kennedy Award in 2015.

In 2017 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Yelick is married to University of California, Berkeley professor James Demmel, who is also an ACM Fellow and works in computer science and numerical linear algebra.