Nancy Amato

Nancy M. Amato is a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University where she co-directs the Parasol Lab and is chair of the university-level Alliance for Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Systems Biology. She received undergraduate degrees in Mathematical Sciences and Economics from Stanford University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was an AT&T Bell Laboratories PhD Scholar, she is a recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, she is a Distinguished Speaker for the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program, she was a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (2006-2007), and she has received numerous awards recognizing her contributions in research, teaching and service.

She is an Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Conference Editorial Board, is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications, she served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation and of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and she serves on review panels for NIH and NSF. She is an elected member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Administrative Committee, she is a member of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) and of the ACM, IEEE, and CRA sponsored Coalition to Diversity Computing (CDC); she co-directs the CDC/CRA-W Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) program (known as the DMP from 1994-2008) and she co-directs the CDC/CRA-W Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS).

Her main areas of research focus are motion planning and robotics, computational biology and geometry, and parallel and distributed computing. Current representative projects include the development of a new technique for modeling molecular motions (e.g., protein folding), investigation of new strategies for crowd control and simulation, and STAPL, a parallel C++ library enabling the development of efficient, portable parallel programs.