Rate My Professor Katherine Yelick

Katherine Yelick is the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has served in the Computer Science faculty since joining as an Assistant Professor in 1991. She advanced to Associate Professor in 1996, full Professor in 2002, and Distinguished Professor in 2019. Currently, she holds the position of Vice Chancellor for Research since 2022 and previously served as Associate Dean for Research and Executive Associate Dean in the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society from 2020 to 2021. Yelick is also a Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2008, with prior leadership roles including Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences from 2010 to 2019 and Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center from 2008 to 2012. She earned her B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985 and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1991.

Yelick's research focuses on high performance computing, programming systems, parallel algorithms, communication-avoiding algorithms, automatic performance tuning, and computational biology including high performance genome analysis. She co-invented the Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Titanium Partitioned Global Address Space languages and led the ExaBiome project on scalable tools for microbiome analysis as part of the Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project. She co-leads the Berkeley Benchmarking and Optimization group. Key publications include 'The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley' (2006), 'Exascale Computing Study: Technology Challenges in Achieving Exascale Systems' (2008), 'Optimization of Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication on Emerging Multicore Platforms' (2007), and contributions to 'AI for Science' (2020). Her influence extends to leadership in national computing facilities, service on committees such as the Computing Community Consortium, National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, and editorial contributions. Major awards include election to the National Academy of Engineering (2017) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017), ACM Fellow (2012), AAAS Fellow (2018), ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award (2015), ACM-W Athena Award (2013-2014), CRA Distinguished Service Award (2022), and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lifetime Achievement Award (2020).