Kathy Herring Hayashi has been involved in the semiconductor industry her entire career — developing, deploying, and analyzing advanced software tools used to create computer and mobile phone chips. At Unisys, she was on the team that created one of the first Sperry mainframes on a chip using custom software. She has since worked for Cadence Design Systems and Syntricity, a local startup focused on yield analysis. She is now at Qualcomm, working with semiconductor workflows in large-scale compute environments. She is currently the IEEE Director of Region 6 (Western Region of the United States) and a member of the IEEE Board of Directors. She is a senior member of IEEE and IEEE-HKN (IEEE Honor Society).