Kimberly C. "KC" Claffy is director of the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis at the University of California, San Diego.

She earned her doctoral degree under the supervision of George Polyzos at the University of California, San Diego in 1994.

Her years in graduate school occurred during the period in which the federal government of the United States relaxed control over the Internet.

In 1996 Claffy founded the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) in the supercomputing centre at the University of California, San Diego.

[12] She was awarded an National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator planning grant to evaluate the feasibility of creating an open knowledge network on the properties of the Internet identifier system.