Conilee Gay Kirkpatrick (born 1948)[1] is an American electronics engineer.
Kirkpatrick graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1969[1] and earned a PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1974, with the dissertation Photoluminescence from Ion Implanted Silicon.[2] She worked for General Electric on storage tube technology in the 1970s,[3] and became director of advanced technology implementation for Rockwell International's Microelectronics R&D Center.[4] As a senior scientist at Science Applications International Corporation,[5] she developed an artificial neural network on an integrated circuit, to be used as an AI accelerator.[6] She later became a vice president of HRL Laboratories,[5] and a member of the National Materials Advisory Board of the National Research Council.[7]
Along with her professional work in engineering, Kirkpatrick has been active in mentoring Southern California middle-school girls in engineering.[8]
Kirkpatrick was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 1998, "for leadership in development and manufacturing of III-V electronic materials and devices and their application to military and commercial systems".[9]