Nancy M. Amato is Abel Bliss Professor and Department Head of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Amato’s research focuses on robotic motion planning, computational biology and geometry, and parallel computing, and she has been working to broaden participation in computing for more than two decades. She has graduated 23 PhD students, including 11 from underrepresented groups.
Amato received the 2019 IEEE RAS George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation, the 2014 CRA Habermann Award, and the inaugural NCWIT Harrold and Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award in 2014. She is a Fellow of the AAAI, AAAS, ACM, and IEEE.