McKinley Strahan Graduate Fellowship Fund
Dr. Kathryn S. McKinley, Scotty Strahan, and their sons Cooper, Dylan, and Wyatt founded this fellowship to encourage students to pursue a PhD in computer science, even though they may face social or economic obstacles.
As a woman and the first member of her family to earn a PhD, Dr. McKinley often was confronted with bias and limited social support during her PhD studies. However, she was extremely fortunate to have a few faculty members who introduced her to research, mentored her, and encouraged her persistence. She has taught and mentored over 1,000 PhD students and directly supervised 24. For over 20 years, she has been a speaker and mentor in CRA-W and other programs that encourage women and minorities to pursue their PhDs. This fellowship represents her and her family’s continued devotion to PhD students and their success, and in particular, to students who face any obstacles due to their social environment or financial resources.
About Kathryn McKinley
Dr. McKinley is a Distinguished Software Engineer at Google. She currently works on AI for transforming systems software to use safe programming languages. She was previously an Endowed Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Her teams produced: the DaCapo Java Benchmarks (30,000+ downloads), Lifetime-Aware VM Allocation (LAVA), the TRIPS Compiler, the Hoard memory manager, the MMTk memory management toolkit, the Immix garbage collector and the SHIM profiler.
Dr. McKinley received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award. Her service was recognized with CRA, SIGPLAN and ISCA service awards. She is a former Board member of Darpa ISAT, CRA and CRA-WP (co-chair). She was honored to testify to the U.S. House Science Committee (2013). Her research has received numerous test-of-time and best paper awards. She is an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.