Katherine Yelick is the Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the co-author of two books and more than 100 refereed technical papers on parallel languages, compilers, algorithms, libraries, architecture, and storage. She co-invented the UPC and Titanium languages and demonstrated their applicability across architectures through the use of novel runtime and compilation methods. She also co-developed techniques for self-tuning numerical libraries, including the first self-tuned library for sparse matrix kernels which automatically adapt the code to properties of the matrix structure and machine.

Her work includes performance analysis and modeling as well as optimization techniques for memory hierarchies, multicore processors, communication libraries, and processor accelerators. 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 earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and has been a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley since 1991 with a joint research appointment at Berkeley Lab since 1996. She has received multiple research and teaching awards and is 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 was appointed to the Council in 2009.