Jan 4 2013
Dr. Nancy Amato, Unocal Professor and OSIS director in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, was named a Distinguished Scientist by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).
Dr. Nancy Amato
This prestigious award honors those ACM members who have made significant contributions and achievements in computing. The ACM began its Distinguished Member Recognition Program in 2006.
Amato is co-director of the Parasol Lab at Texas A&M. She is a deputy director of the Institute for Applied Math and Computational Science (IAMCS), an associate director of the Center for Large-Scale Scientific Simulations (CLASS), and chair of the university-level Alliance for Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Systems Biology (ABCS).
Amato received undergraduate degrees in mathematical sciences and economics from Stanford University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was an AT&T Bell Laboratories Ph.D. Scholar and a recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. She is a distinguished speaker for the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program and was a distinguished lecturer for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (2006-2007). She is an IEEE fellow.
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/
The Association for Computing Machinery is the world's largest and most prestigious scientific and educational computing society. As of 2011, ACM membership exceeds 100,000 people.
The ACM states, "ACM Distinguished Member status represents an important ACM Membership and career milestone. Recipients of this honor include computer scientists and engineers from some of the world's leading corporations, research labs, and universities who made significant advances in technology that are having lasting impacts on the lives of people across the globe."