Katherine A. Yelick is the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley. She holds a joint appointment as Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she previously served as Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences (2010-2019) and Director of NERSC (2008-2012). Her research spans high-performance computing, programming systems, parallel algorithms, and computational genomics, with leadership roles in projects like ExaBiome and Bebop. Ph.D. in EECS from MIT (1991) M.S. in EECS from MIT (1985) B.S. in EECS from MIT (1982) Yelick specializes in parallel programming languages , automatic performance tuning , and exascale computing , co-inventing Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Titanium. Her recent work focuses on genomic data analysis , GPU-accelerated algorithms , and communication-avoiding techniques for large-scale scientific computing. Her publications reveal trends in bioinformatics , GPU parallelism , and exascale-ready frameworks , with keywords spanning computational biology, algorithms, and cloud computing. Awards include the ACM-IEEE Ken Kennedy Award (2015), National Academy of Engineering (2017), and AAAS Fellowship (2018). Leadership : ExaBiome (exascale microbiome analysis), Bebop (optimization group) Mentorship : Co-advising Alok Tripathy and Reginald Frank As a key figure in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 's Computing Sciences division, she oversees NERSC, ESnet, and CRD, driving interdisciplinary applications in climate, fusion, and biomedical research.










