Annamaria Beatrice (Nina) Amenta 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 ...

who works as the Tim Bucher Family Professor of Computer Science and the chair of the Computer Science Department at the

University of California, Davis The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The institut ...

. She specializes in

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

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

, and is particularly known for her research in reconstructing surfaces from scattered data points.. Amenta grew up in

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...

, and majored in classical civilization at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

, graduating in 1979.. After working for over ten years as a computer programmer, she returned to graduate school, and earned her Ph.D. in 1994 from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

with a thesis on relations between

Helly's theorem Helly's theorem is a basic result in discrete geometry on the intersection of convex sets. It was discovered by Eduard Helly in 1913,. but not published by him until 1923, by which time alternative proofs by and had already appeared. Helly's t ...

and generalized linear programming, supervised by

Raimund Seidel Raimund G. Seidel is a German and Austrian theoretical computer scientist and an expert in computational geometry. Seidel was born in Graz, Austria, and studied with Hermann Maurer at the Graz University of Technology. He received his M. Sc. in 19 ...

. After postdoctoral study at

The Geometry Center The Geometry Center was a mathematics research and education center at the University of Minnesota. It was established by the National Science Foundation in the late 1980s and closed in 1998. The focus of the center's work was the use of computer ...

and

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

, she became a faculty member at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

, and moved to Davis in 2002. She became the Bucher Professor and department chair in 2013. Amenta was co-chair of the

Symposium on Computational Geometry The International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG) is an academic conference in computational geometry. It was founded in 1985, and was originally sponsored by the SIGACT and SIGGRAPH Special Interest Groups of the Association for Computin ...

in 2006, with Otfried Cheong.Proceedings of the twenty-second annual symposium on Computational geometry

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 ...

, retrieved 2015-06-29.

References

External links

Google scholar profile
{{DEFAULTSORT:Amenta, Nina Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American women computer scientists Yale College alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni University of Texas at Austin faculty University of California, Davis faculty Researchers in geometric algorithms Computer graphics researchers Scientists at PARC (company) American computer scientists 21st-century American women scientists 21st-century American scientists American women academics