Ammons was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech, in 1982.[3] Her dissertation, A Generation Expansion Planning Model For Electric Utilities, was supervised by Leon McGinnis, and concerned generation expansion planning.[4]
After completing her doctorate, she remained in industrial engineering at Georgia Tech as a faculty member, the department's first faculty member to be a woman.[3] She was president of the Institute of Industrial Engineers for 2009–2010.[5] When she was named chair of industrial engineering at Georgia Tech in 2011,[6] she became the first woman to chair an engineering department at Georgia Tech. She retired in 2014.[3]