Kathryn McKinley is a Distinguished Software Engineer at Google. She currently works on AI for transforming systems software to use safe programming languages. She was previously an Endowed Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Her teams produced systems that include the DaCapo Java Benchmarks (30,000+ downloads), the Hoard memory manager, the MMTk memory management toolkit, the Immix garbage collector, the SHIM profiler, the TRIPS Compiler, and Lifetime-Aware VM Allocation (LAVA).

Dr. McKinley received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award and the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award. Her service was recognized with CRA, SIGPLAN, and ISCA service awards. She is a former Board member of Darpa ISAT, CRA, and CRA-WP (co-chair). She testified to the U.S. House Science Committee (2013). Her research has received numerous test-of-time and best paper awards. Dr. McKinley has graduated 23 PhD students. She is an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.