Amy completed her undergraduate degree in Environmental Sciences at Willamette University in 1988 and her PhD in Biological Sciences at Stanford University in 1997. Her doctoral thesis was based in Hawaii, examining controls of water availability on carbon and nutrient cycles in native forest ecosystems. A National Science Foundation (USA) postdoctoral fellowship took her to Argentina, where she began focusing on terrestrial ecosystem ecology in the Patagonian region of southern South America. She began work as a research scientist in the Scientific Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) and also joined the faculty at the College of Agronomy at the University of Buenos Aires. She is an editor at New Phytologist and a senior editor at the Journal of Ecology. In 2018, Amy was awarded the L’Oréal–UNESCO Award For Women in Science for Latin America.