She is Mitchell T. and Lella Blanche Bowie Endowed Chair in Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington.
Atman majored in industrial engineering at West Virginia University, graduating in 1979.
She earned a master's degree in industrial and systems engineering at Ohio State University in 1983, and completed a PhD in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in 1990.
[1] After postdoctoral research supported by the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the United States Agency for International Development, working on engineering education in developing countries, she became an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh in 1991.
[5] Atman is the coauthor, with M. Granger Morgan, Baruch Fischhoff, and Ann Bostrom, of the book Risk Communication: A Mental Models Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2002)[6]