Nancy Marie Amato is an American computer scientist noted for her research on the algorithmic foundations of

motion planning Motion planning, also path planning (also known as the navigation problem or the piano mover's problem) is a computational problem to find a sequence of valid configurations that moves the object from the source to destination. The term is use ...

, computational biology, computational geometry and parallel computing. Amato is the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

. Amato is noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing, and is currently a member of the steering committee of CRA-WP (formerly known as CRA-W), of which she has been a member of the board since 2000.

Education

Amato received both a

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four year ...

degree in

Economics Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes ...

and a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

degree in

Mathematical Sciences The mathematical sciences are a group of areas of study that includes, in addition to mathematics, those academic disciplines that are primarily mathematical in nature but may not be universally considered subfields of mathematics proper. Statist ...

from Stanford University in 1986. She received an MS in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988, with advisor

Manuel Blum Manuel Blum (born 26 April 1938) is a Venezuelan-American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1995 "In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and ...

. In 1995, she received a PhD in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under advisor

Franco P. Preparata Franco P. Preparata is a computer scientist, the An Wang Professor, Emeritus, of Computer Science at Brown University. He is best known for his 1985 book "Computational Geometry: An Introduction" into which he blended salient parts of M. I. ...

for her thesis "Parallel Algorithms for Convex Hulls and Proximity Problems".

Career and research

She joined the Department of Computer Science at

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...

as an assistant professor in 1995. She was promoted to associate professor in 2000, to professor in 2004, and to Unocal professor in 2011. In July 2018, Amato was named the next head of the Department of Computer Science at the

, starting in January 2019. Amato has several notable results. Her paper on probabilistic roadmap methods (PRMs) is one of the most important papers on PRM. It describes the first PRM variant that does not use uniform sampling in the robot's configuration space. She wrote a seminal paper with one of her students that shows how the PRM methodology can be applied to protein motions, and in particular protein folding. This approach has opened up a new research area in computational biology. This result opens up a rich new set of applications for this technique in computational biology. Another paper she wrote with her students represents a major advance by showing how global energy landscape statistics, such as relative folding rates and population kinetics, can be computed for proteins from the approximate landscapes computed by Amato's PRM-based method. In another paper, she and a student introduced a novel technique, approximate convex decomposition (ACD), for partitioning a

polyhedron In geometry, a polyhedron (plural polyhedra or polyhedrons; ) is a three-dimensional shape with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. A convex polyhedron is the convex hull of finitely many points, not all on ...

into approximately convex pieces. Amato also co-leads the STAPL project with her husband Lawrence Rauchwerger, who is also a computer scientist on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. STAPL is a parallel C++ library.

Awards and honors

Her notable awards include: * Elected an

AAAI Fellow Fellowship of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated as AAAI Fellow or FAAAI) is an award granted to individuals that the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), judged to have made ...

in 2018 by the

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

* Elected an

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing * ...

in 2015 by the Association for Computing Machinery * In 2010, she was named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow "for contributions to the algorithmic foundations of motion planning in robotics and computational biology." * A. Nico Habermann Award from the

Computing Research Association The Computing Research Association (CRA) is a 501(c)3 non-profit association of North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia enga ...

in 2014 * Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2013 for contributions to the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry, and parallel computing. * Hewlett-Packard/ Harriett B. Rigas Award, 2013. * ACM Distinguished Member in 2012

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Amato, Nancy American women computer scientists American computer scientists Texas A&M University faculty Fellow Members of the IEEE Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Living people Scientists from Portland, Oregon Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences alumni Year of birth missing (living people) Grainger College of Engineering alumni American women academics UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni 21st-century American women