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Life outside the computer science lab:
Jim Demmel & Kathy Yelik, married with children
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"We try hard not to put too much pressure on the kids
when it comes to school." Yelick says. "With two
academic parents, they’re going to feel academic pressure
whether we apply it or not."
BART NAGEL PHOTO
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Professors Jim Demmel and Kathy Yelick are collaborating on the
most difficult, time-consuming, and rewarding experiment of their
lives. They’re raising a family. And while Demmel and Yelick
are not the only couple in the Berkeley’s Computer Sciences
Division, their relationship is a quintessential College of Engineering
love story.
Demmel, a Berkeley alum (Ph.D.'83), spent six years on the faculty
of the Courant Institute at New York Univeristy before returning
to bear territory in 1990 with a joint faculty appointment in
Berkeley’s Computer Sciences Division and Mathematics. Several
months after he arrived, Yelick completed her Ph.D. at MIT and
accepted a faculty position at Berkeley, where she met Demmel.
Living in faculty apartments on the University’s Clark Kerr
Campus, they’d jog together in the mornings before immersing
themselves in work that often kept them at campus into the night.
"I realized quickly that Jim never used his apartment oven
for anything other than melting the snow seal on his boots,"
Yelick remembers. "So we’d work late on campus and
then go out to dinner and talk."
Computer science was not their favorite topic of conversation,
Demmel says. Still, they understood each other’s dedication
to their work. And as they grew closer, they realized they were
more fortunate than many other academic couples.
"When I was single and a graduate student at Berkeley, I
attended a seminar on what happens when one person in a couple
gets a job offer somewhere and the other has to make a decision,"
Demmel says. "The psychologists leading the seminar said
most couples break up over this. We counted our blessings because
we met after we’d gotten our jobs."
The two bought a house together in the Berkeley hills in 1991.
Eighteen months later they married. Then came a year-long sabbatical
to MIT and Switzerland in 1996 and the birth of their daughter
Megan, now six and a half. "The news of Megan arrived right
along with Kathy’s tenure letter," Demmel says.
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children don’t spend much time in front of the computer.
"They’re better off in the long run if they have
good social skills at this age," Yelick says. Still,
the family often looks to science to explain the phenomena
of everyday life. "I just want them to acquire a curiosity
about how the world works," Demmel says.
BART NAGEL PHOTO
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The couple was collaborating on a large grant proposal for an
Advanced Simulation and Computing project about the time Megan
was born. At two in the morning Yelick, Demmel, and a group of
graduate students would be hammering away on the proposal. Megan
would sleep quietly in the corner, until she woke up hungry.
It was an exhausting time, Kathy says. "Jim would hold Megan
in the rocking chair," she says, "but next to him would
be all these papers with scribbles on them. Jim had been proving
theorems all night while he rocked the baby."
Now parents of two — Nathan arrived in 1998 — their
research momentum continues. Demmel is chief scientist for the
Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of
Society (CITRIS), and Yelick is one of the CITRIS researchers.
They’re also principal investigators for the Berkeley Benchmarking
and Optimization Group (BeBOP), studying how to tune computer
software and hardware for optimal performance. Their efforts could
dramatically improve methods of scientific computing and information
retrieval.
Yet even under the unyielding pressures of academic life, Demmel
and Yelick put family first. They alternate days picking up the
kids from school (keeping the schedule straight with collaborative
calendar software, of course), hit the hiking trails or the Chabot
Space & Science Center on the weekends, and take adventurous
trips when the opportunity arises. Most recently, Demmel was invited
to speak at the world’s most prestigious mathematics conference
in Beijing, China. After much deliberation about time zones and
the unique challenges of traveling internationally with small
children, the entire family packed their bags.
"What’s the point of having kids unless you really
want to spend time with them?" Demmel says.
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FOREFRONT takes you into the
labs, classrooms, and lives of professors, students, and alumni
for an intimate look at the innovative research, teaching, and
campus life that define the College of Engineering at the University
of California, Berkeley.
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