She joined the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University as an assistant professor in 1995. She was promoted to associate professor in 2000, to professor in 2004, and to Unocal professor in 2011.
Amato has several notable results. Her paper on probabilistic roadmap methods (PRMs) is one of the most important papers on PRM. It describes the first PRM variant that does not use uniform sampling in the robot's configuration space.[6] She wrote a seminal paper with one of her students that shows how the PRM methodology can be applied to protein motions, and in particular protein folding. This approach has opened up a new research area in computational biology.[7] This result opens up a rich new set of applications for this technique in computational biology. Another paper she wrote with her students represents a major advance by showing how global energy landscape statistics, such as relative folding rates and population kinetics, can be computed for proteins from the approximate landscapes computed by Amato's PRM-based method.[8] In another paper, she and a student introduced a novel technique, approximate convex decomposition (ACD), for partitioning a polyhedron into approximately convex pieces.[9] Amato also co-leads the STAPL project with her husband Lawrence Rauchwerger, who is also a computer scientist on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[citation needed] STAPL is a parallel C++ library.[10]
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2013[15] for contributions to the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry, and parallel computing.
^Nancy M. Amato; Osman B. Bayazit; Lucia K. Dale; Christopher Jones & Daniel Vallejo (1998). "OBPRM: An Obstacle-Based PRM for 3D Workspaces". Robotics: The Algorithmic Perspective (Selected Contributions of WAFR 1998): 155–168.
^Guang Song & Nancy M. Amato (2004). "A Motion Planning Approach to Folding: From Paper Craft to Protein Foldin". IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation: 60–71.
^Gabriel Tanase, Antal Buss, Adam Fidel, Harshvardhan, Ioannis Papadopoulos, Olga Pearce, Timmie Smith, Nathan Thomas, Xiabing Xu, Nedhal Mourad, Jeremy Vu, Mauro Bianco, Nancy M. Amato, and Lawrence Rauchwerger (2011). "The STAPL Parallel Container Framework". In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium of Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP): 235–246.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineering (2010). "Fellow Class of 2010". Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Archived from the original on 2013-05-16. Retrieved 2013-04-28.