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| Kathryn McKinley, UT Austin Professor and Faculty Award Recipient |
Back when Kathryn McKinley was just a sophomore at Rice University, she would not necessarily have predicted that she would end up a computer science professor. All she knew then was that she liked and excelled in math. It was this affinity that inspired her to sign up for her first programming class, and from that point on, she was hooked. Still, she had not planned to attend graduate school until a summer research stint as an undergraduate changed her mind. She worked with Rice professor Don Johnson studying performance in local area networks. Their conclusions were highly intriguing: the disk was the most likely bottleneck. Most people thought the network would cause performance problems in distributed systems and were caught off guard by their findings. This experience inspired her to pursue a research career. McKinley explains: “What I like most about being a researcher in computer science is that there are so many questions that people don’t know to ask and/or don’t know the answers to. I like understanding computer systems and then making them perform well.”
It was not until late in graduate school that McKinley finally made up her mind to become a professor. After finishing as a student at Rice in 1992 and working there briefly as a research scientist, she moved to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she taught for almost a decade. In 2001, she began her current position as associate professor in the computer science department at the University of Texas at Austin. As a teacher, McKinley says her goal is to create a “positive and innovative learning environment” for her students.
McKinley started collaborating with IBM in 2000 as part of the DaCapo project, the first group outside of IBM to use Jikes RVM, which was developed by IBM Watson. Members of her team helped the project become free software by creating memory management toolkits (GCTk and MMTk) for it.Together they have invented a number of innovative and high performance garbage collectors and optimizations in this framework. McKinley’s working with IBM soon took on another dimension when she moved to Austin. She started collaborating with IBM and Doug Burger, also a computer science professor at UT Austin, on her cooperative hardware/software memory management project. Among McKinley’s numerous distinctions are two IBM faculty awards, which she won this and last year.
McKinley has been remarkably successful in a field in which women pursuing degrees and filling faculty positions are a minority. “My experience has been great as a woman in computer science. I have had lots of men (mostly) and women supporters that have validated my choices, supported me when times were tough, and cheered me on when times were good.” McKinley now wants to give young women today the same encouragement that she is so thankful to have received. To that end, she is involved with the First Bytes program at UT Austin (designed to introduce high school girls to computer science) and the Distributed Mentor Project (aimed to boost the number of women graduate students in computer science and engineering). She has also served on the UT Women in Natural Sciences Advisory Committee.
According to McKinley: “I think the systemic societal problems are really hard. We have to value women and their work contributions, instead of just their supporting roles to men and children. In the U.S. we’ve come pretty far, but we still have a long way to go towards equal support for working women and men, and equal work in the home.” This progressive-minded academic has chosen to lead by example, breaking tradition in her own life and career and encouraging others to do the same. She adds: “I have three boys, ages nine, six, and three, and a wonderful husband who is an artist and stay-at-home dad.” Hats off to Kathryn McKinley – researcher, mother, and professor rolled into one – for proving that it is possible to do it all!
- By Emily Seen, 2004 Austin CAS Summer Intern