Conditional tags

Hi,

Right now I have certain links in my sidebar appear based on what page you are looking at. What I would prefer is having those links appear based on which user is logged in. Such as:

If logged in user = Amanda show these links or if logged in user = user level 2 show these links

Is there a way to do this? Would using the conditional tags below be the same?

is_author(‘2’)

is_author(‘Amanda’)

I’d be more interested in showing links based on user name or user level since I don’t promote people to actual author roles. Isn’t there an is_user() type of conditional tag? I didn’t see it listed on the “conditional tags” page of Codex.

Thanks