Kathy Yelick Named Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences

Kathy Yelick has been named Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences. Yelick has been the director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) since 2008, a position she will continue to hold.

“I am very pleased to see Kathy Yelick assume this critical role in senior leadership as Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences,” said Berkeley Lab Director Paul Alivisatos. “We will benefit immensely from her knowledge and vision. She will have tremendous opportunity to use Berkeley Lab’s strengths in scientific computing and advanced networking to accelerate research that addresses some of our nation’s most urgent scientific challenges.”

Yelick is an expert on parallel languages, compilers, algorithms, libraries, architecture, and storage. She has worked with interdisciplinary teams on application scaling, and her own applications work includes parallelization of a model for blood flow in the heart. She is the co-inventor of the UPC and Titanium languages and co-developed automatic performance tuning techniques for sparse matrix computations.

Yelick has received a number of research and teaching awards and is the co-author of two books and more than 100 refereed technical papers. She is currently a member of the California Council on Science and Technology and a member of the National Academies committee on Sustaining Growth in Computing Performance.

She earned her Ph.D. in computer science from MIT and has been a professor at UC Berkeley since 1991, with a joint research appointment at Berkeley Lab since 1996.