Kathryn S. McKinley

Kathryn S. McKinley is a Distinguished Software Engineer at Google, where she has been since 2017. Previously, she was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft (2011-2017); an Endowed Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin (2001-2013); and an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts (1993-2001).

Her research aspires to make programming easy and the resulting programs correct and efficient. Her interests span programming languages, compilers, systems, architecture, and cloud with a focus on performance, parallelism, and memory optimizations. Spanning McKinley's entire career, her students, collaborators, and she developed a wide range of novel tools and optimizations to understand and improve performance, parallelism, and locality.

Her current work focuses on analysis and tools for optimizing the performance and efficiency of Google's cloud. At Google, her teams have improved the availability, efficiency, and performance of cloud customer applications and delivered mitigations for the L1 Terminal Fault Intel security problem, receiving numerous Google Feats of Engineering Awards and Google Technical Innovation Awards.

McKinley and her collaborators have produced software systems widely used in academia and industry. Her contributions to the theory and practice of memory management include a wide range of optimizations and algorithms for explicit memory management and automatic memory management.

She received her BA, MS, and PhD from Rice University, where her PhD advisor was Ken Kennedy.