[2] Katherine Yelick received her SB, SM, and PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completing her thesis in 1990.

In her role as associate laboratory director, Yelick led the development of the 2019 Computing Sciences Strategic Plan for Berkeley Lab.

In the introduction to that plan, she said: Computing has transformed nearly every aspect of scientific inquiry — across disciplines and across scales — from the behavior of subatomic particles to the formation of structures in the early universe, from the assembly of the human genome to the evolution of earth systems.She also led a major initiative, Machine Learning (ML) for Science, in which researchers developed advanced machine learning tools to accelerate discovery in a wide range of scientific disciplines.

The research enterprise at UC Berkeley attracted $871 million in extramural support in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2022.

The American Academy citation said that "her research enables use of new high-performance architectures and eases programming of applications with irregular communication patterns."

Yelick is married to University of California, Berkeley professor James Demmel, who is also an ACM Fellow and works in computer science and numerical linear algebra.