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Image of Nancy AmatoDr. Nancy M. Amato, Unocal Professor and Regents Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, was honored with the 2015 Distinguished Educator Award from the University of Illinois, where she received her Ph.D. in computer science.

This award is presented to a computer science alumnus who has made exceptional contributions to computer science education and research, and recognizes those who excel at motivating computer science students.

Amato is senior director of the engineering honors program at Texas A&M and is co-director of the Parasol Lab, which focuses on research related to next-generation computing languages and systems, and the development of algorithms and applications that exploit these to solve computation and/or data intensive applications.

She is program chair for the upcoming Robotics: Systems and Science Conference and is an elected member of the CRA Board of Directors (2014-2017). She served as co-chair for the National Center for Women in Information Technology Academic Alliance (2009-2011) and is currently co-chair of the Computing Research Association's Committees on the Status of Women in Computing Research.

Most recently, Amato was named a 2015 Association for Computing Machinery Fellow for her contributions to robotics and leadership in broadening participation in computing, and a 2015 Texas A&M Regents Professor. She was also named in Robohub’s “25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About.”

Her research interests include motion planning and robotics, computational biology and geometry, and parallel and distributed computing.