Nancy Marie Amato is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

noted for her research on the algorithmic foundations of motion planning,

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

computational geometry Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems ar ...

and

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...

. Amato is the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Amato is noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing, and is currently a member of the steering committee of

CRA-WP The Computing Research Association's Committee on Widening Participation in Computing Research (CRA-WP) has the mission of increasing the success and participation of underrepresented groups in computing research and education at all levels. In par ...

(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 degree in Economics and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematical Sciences from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1986. She received an MS in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988, with advisor Manuel Blum. In 1995, she received a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under advisor Franco P. Preparata 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 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 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, starting in January 2019. Amato has several notable results. Her paper on

probabilistic roadmap The probabilistic roadmap planner is a motion planning algorithm in robotics, which solves the problem of determining a path between a starting configuration of the robot and a goal configuration while avoiding collisions. The basic idea behind P ...

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

. 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 into approximately convex pieces. Amato also co-leads the STAPL project with her husband

Lawrence Rauchwerger The following is largely out of date as of 2023, as Prof. Rauchwerger has moved (back) to UIUC. Lawrence Rauchwerger is an American computer scientist noted for his research in parallel computing, compilers, and computer architecture. He is ...

, 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 in 2018 by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence * Elected an ACM Fellow in 2015 by the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

* In 2010, she was named an

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

(IEEE) Fellow "for contributions to the algorithmic foundations of motion planning in robotics and computational biology." *

A. Nico Habermann Award 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 ...

from the Computing Research Association in 2014 * Fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

(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