Katherine Yelick Named Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The university’s press room announced that Katherine “Kathy” Yelick was appointed as the ninth director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). An internationally recognized leader in high-performance computing and large-scale scientific research, Yelick currently serves as vice chancellor for research at UC Berkeley and has held joint appointments at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley for three decades. 

Berkeley Lab is an internationally renowned institution dedicated to addressing urgent scientific challenges, from advancing energy solutions and protecting human health to revealing the origins and fate of the universe. Managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science since 1931, the lab has earned global distinction for discoveries recognized with numerous honors, including multiple Nobel Prizes.  

Yelick succeeds Director Michael S. Witherell, who has led the lab since 2016. She brings deep executive leadership and management experience across both the University of California and the DOE national laboratory system. She joined the UC Berkeley faculty in electrical engineering and computer sciences in 1991 and became a faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab in 1996.

Since then, she has held multiple senior leadership positions at both institutions, including director of Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) from 2008 to 2012 and Berkeley Lab’s associate laboratory director for computing sciences from 2010 to 2019. In these roles, she oversaw large, matrixed organizations, managed major DOE user facilities, and led multidisciplinary teams operating at the intersection of science, technology and operations. She also held leadership roles at UC Berkeley, serving as an associate dean of the newly established Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society from 2020 through 2021 and as vice chancellor for research starting in 2022.  You can read more at https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room.