[1] Amato is the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
[2] She received an MS in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988, with advisor Manuel Blum.
[3] In 1995, she received a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under advisor Franco P. Preparata for her thesis "Parallel Algorithms for Convex Hulls and Proximity Problems".
In July 2018, Amato was named the next head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, starting in January 2019.
[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.