Kathryn S. McKinley is a Distinguished Engineer at Google. She previously was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft and held an Endowed Professorship at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research spans programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, architecture, performance, and energy. She and her collaborators have produced several tools widely used in industry and academia: the DaCapo Java Benchmarks (30,000+ downloads), the TRIPS Compiler, Hoard memory manager, MMTk memory management toolkit, and the Immix and LXR garbage collectors.

Dr. McKinley is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an IEEE Fellow, and an ACM Fellow. Her research has garnered Test-of-Time awards (ASPLOS, OOPSLA (2), SIGMETRICS, ICS), best paper awards (PLDI, Middlewear, ASPLOS), IEEE MICRO Top Picks awards (4), SIGPLAN Research Highlights (2), NVMW Memorable Paper, and CACM Research Highlights (3). Dr. McKinley was honored to testify to the House Science Committee (Feb. 14, 2013). She served on the CRA Board and as CRA-W co-chair. Dr. McKinley was honored to testify to the House Science Committee (Feb. 14, 2013). She has graduated 22 PhD students. She and her husband have three sons.