Nina Amenta

Annamaria Beatrice "Nina" Amenta (born 1958 or 1959) is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Davis. Her research is in computational geometry, computer graphics, and visualization, especially algorithms for collecting, processing, reconstructing, and visualizing three-dimensional shapes.

Education and career

Amenta grew up in Pittsburgh, where as a high-school student in the 1970s she explored mathematical patterns inspired by M. C. Escher and used Carnegie Mellon University library books to learn about repeating patterns.

She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994. Her dissertation, Helly Theorems and Generalized Linear Programming, was supervised by Raimund Seidel.

After postdoctoral work at The Geometry Center and Xerox PARC, Amenta joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. She moved to the University of California, Davis in 2002.

Research

Amenta is known for her work on surface reconstruction from scattered data points. Tamal K. Dey's book Curve and Surface Reconstruction describes work by Amenta and Marshall Bern as the first surface reconstruction algorithm with proved guarantees.

Her later work has included point-set surfaces, geometric algorithms for three-dimensional modeling, forest LiDAR visualization, biological shape analysis, applications in graphics and visualization, and GPU-based algorithms for geometric computation.

Amenta has collaborated with physical anthropologist Eric Delson on modeling gradual evolutionary change in primate skull morphology, using laser-scanned skulls and evolutionary trees based on genomic data.

Awards and honors

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship UC Davis Chancellor's Fellowship Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications Test of Time Award, 2020 UC Davis College of Engineering Outstanding Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2021

Selected publications