Kathryn S. McKinley

Kathryn S. McKinley (born January 10, 1962, in Owensboro, Kentucky) is an American computer scientist recognized for her contributions to compilers, runtime systems and computer architecture. She earned her degree from Rice University under doctoral advisor Ken Kennedy, has held positions at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Texas at Austin and Microsoft, and currently works as a Distinguished Software Engineer at Google. She is known for work on locality and parallelism optimizations, the Hoard memory allocator, the DaCapo Java benchmarks, the Immix mark-region garbage collector and the TRIPS compiler. She served as co-chair of CRA-W from 2011 to 2014 to increase participation in computing fields, was named an ACM Fellow in 2008 and an IEEE Fellow in 2011, and received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award in 2023.