Amenta is a professor and chair of Computer Science at UC Davis and is part of the Visualization and Graphics Research Group.
She works in computational geometry, using discrete geometry to develop algorithms for problems in areas like computer graphics and simulation. Her research has focused on the construction of good models of 3D objects from clouds of points, computational algorithms for geometric structures, and visualization for computational biology and ecology.
She is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship and an NSF CAREER award. Amenta received her Ph.D. in 1994 from UC Berkeley. She served as the CITRIS campus Director at UC Davis from 2011-2015.