Kathy Yelick has served as Lab Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since July 2026. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab delivers scientific breakthroughs over a remarkable range of basic and applied science.
Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and is recognized worldwide for scientific discovery and innovation across energy, computing, physics, biology, chemistry, materials science, and earth and environmental science.
Yelick is an internationally recognized computer scientist with a distinguished career in research, teaching, and scientific leadership at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab. She previously served as Berkeley Lab’s Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences and as director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Her expertise spans high-performance computing, parallel programming, and scientific computing.
Under Yelick’s leadership, Berkeley Lab is expanding its role at the forefront of a new era of science shaped by AI, data science, advanced computing, and interdisciplinary collaboration. She has played a leading role in national initiatives in exascale computing, the integration of scientific facilities, machine learning for science, and AI strategy for the Department of Energy, helping position Berkeley Lab and the DOE national laboratory system to accelerate scientific discovery and address urgent national challenges.
Berkeley Lab’s unique partnership with the University of California strengthens its ability to bring together world-class researchers, students, and scientific facilities in support of DOE’s science and energy missions. Yelick has deep ties to both institutions, with leadership roles at UC Berkeley including associate dean for the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (2020-2022) as well as Vice Chancellor for Research (2022-2026), where she oversaw a billion-dollar research enterprise. She has been a professor at UC Berkeley since 1991 and a faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab since 1996.
Yelick’s research has advanced the fields of high-performance computing, parallel algorithms, and scientific applications, including projects in chemistry, fusion energy, genomics, and computational fluid dynamics. She has also worked across the DOE complex to help launch the Exascale Computing Project, which ran from 2016 to 2024 and developed the critical applications and software needed to make effective use of exascale-capable hardware. She led the ExaBiome project to develop exascale tools for analyzing microbial data. In her previous laboratory leadership roles, she helped launch Berkeley Lab’s Machine Learning for Science initiative, which contributed foundational work for DOE’s Genesis Mission to harness AI for energy, science, and security.
Her distinguished career is marked by numerous honors, including the ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy Award. Yelick is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery. She earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Her leadership and technical contributions continue to shape the intersection of science, technology, and operations.