Amanda Randles is an American computer scientist who is the Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

. Randles is an associate professor of biomedical engineering with secondary appointments in computer science, mathematics, and mechanical engineering and materials science. She is a member of the

Duke Cancer Institute The Duke Cancer Institute (DCI) is a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, research facility, and hospital. The center is part of the Duke University School of Medicine and Duke University Health System located in Dur ...

. Her research interests include biomedical simulation, machine learning, computational fluid dynamics, and

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

Early career and education

In high school, Randles attended the Utica Center for Math, Science, and Technology, where she learned computer programming and its applications in the sciences. She also participated in

Science Olympiad Science Olympiad is an American team competition in which students compete in 23 events pertaining to various fields of science, including earth science, biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. Over 7,800 middle school and high school team ...

and

FIRST Robotics For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (''FIRST'') is an international youth organization that operates the ''FIRST'' Robotics Competition, ''FIRST'' LEGO League Challenge, ''FIRST'' LEGO League Explore, ''FIRST'' LEGO Leagu ...

. Randles attended

, where she completed a B.A. in physics and computer science in 2005. After working for three years as a software developer on the

IBM Blue Gene Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...

project, she went to

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

to earn an S.M. in computer science (2010) and a PhD in

applied physics Applied physics is the application of physics to solve scientific or engineering problems. It is usually considered to be a bridge or a connection between physics and engineering. "Applied" is distinguished from "pure" by a subtle combination ...

(2013) advised by Efthimios Kaxiras and

Hanspeter Pfister Hanspeter Pfister is a Swiss computer scientist. He is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard ...

. She was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP) and in 2011, she was awarded a

Computational Science Graduate Fellowship The Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF) program is a highly selective graduate fellowship program sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and administered by the Krell Institute. Started in 1990, it awards four-year fello ...

by the

Krell Institute The Krell Institute is a 501(3)(c) corporation located in Ames, Iowa near Iowa State University. The organization was founded in 1997 in support of the US Department of Energy's Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program (CSGF), and has sin ...

. She subsequently completed a

practicum A practicum (also called work placement, especially in the UK) is an undergraduate or graduate-level course, often in a specialized field of study, that is designed to give students supervised practical application of a previously or concurrent ...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

and was a visiting scientist at

Franziska Michor Franziska Michor (born 1982) is an Austrian-American computational biologist who is a Professor in the Department of Data Science at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. She serves as Director of the Physical Sciences-Oncology Center and the Cente ...

's laboratory in the

Dana–Farber Cancer Institute Dana–Farber Cancer Institute is a comprehensive cancer treatment and research institution in Boston, Massachusetts. Dana–Farber is the founding member of Dana–Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, Harvard's Comprehensive Cancer Center designated b ...

Academic career

Randles joined the Duke University Biomedical Engineering Department in 2015, where she is currently serving as the Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences. She received tenure in 2023 in Biomedical Engineering and has secondary appointments in mathematics, computer science, and mechanical and materials science. She is also a member of the

Research

Randles' research interests are biomedical simulation and

; specifically, her focus is developing computational tools that can examine the behavior of different diseases, from

atherosclerosis Atherosclerosis is a pattern of the disease arteriosclerosis in which the wall of the artery develops abnormalities, called lesions. These lesions may lead to narrowing due to the buildup of atheroma, atheromatous plaque. At onset there are usu ...

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal b ...

. Randles and her research group have developed fluid dynamics simulation software capable of modeling blood flowing throughout a human body based on full-body CT and

MRI Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to form pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes of the body. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields, magnetic field gradients, and radio waves ...

scans, dubbed HARVEY after the physician

William Harvey William Harvey (1 April 1578 – 3 June 1657) was an English physician who made influential contributions in anatomy and physiology. He was the first known physician to describe completely, and in detail, the systemic circulation and proper ...

. Possible applications include examining how different medical interventions in

cardiovascular disease Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a class of diseases that involve the heart or blood vessels. CVD includes coronary artery diseases (CAD) such as angina and myocardial infarction (commonly known as a heart attack). Other CVDs include stroke, h ...

impact the

circulatory system The blood circulatory system is a system of organs that includes the heart, blood vessels, and blood which is circulated throughout the entire body of a human or other vertebrate. It includes the cardiovascular system, or vascular system, tha ...

and modeling the flow of singular cancer cells through the system. In 2018, Randles was one of ten researchers selected to test simulation-based projects on the

Aurora An aurora (plural: auroras or aurorae), also commonly known as the polar lights, is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly seen in high-latitude regions (around the Arctic and Antarctic). Auroras display dynamic patterns of bri ...

exascale supercomputer in 2021, as part of the Aurora Early Science Program at the

Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory operated by University of Chicago, UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facil ...

. She was awarded an

NSF CAREER Award The National Science Foundation CAREER awards, presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF), are in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education, and the integration of these endeavors i ...

in May 2020 to support her work on HARVEY.

Awards and honors

In 2023, she was warded th
NIH Pioneer award
to support her work combining wearables with physics-based models. She is a Fellow of th
National Academy of Inventors
For her work on ventilator splitting during the Covid-19 pandemic, she was awarded th
Alexandra Jane Noble Epiphany Science Inspiration Award
In 2014, Randles was awarded the NIH Director's Early Independence Award. She was named to the 2015

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, ...

Young Scientist List for her work on the "design of large-scale parallel applications targeting problems in physics". In 2017, she was awarded the

Grace Murray Hopper Award The Grace Murray Hopper Award (named for computer pioneer RADM Grace Hopper) has been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since 1971. The award goes to a computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or serv ...

and was later named to the ''

MIT Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

Innovators Under 35 The Innovators Under 35 is a peer-reviewed annual award and listicle published by ''MIT Technology Review'' magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35. at ''Technology Review'' with lists of winners at technologyreview.com ...

, both given for her work on HARVEY.

Selected publications

* * * * *

References

External links

Amanda Randles
at Duke University
Randles Lab
at the

Pratt School of Engineering The Pratt School of Engineering is located at Duke University in the United States. The school's associated research, education, alumni and service-to-society efforts are collectively known as Duke Engineering. Research expenditures at Duke Engin ...

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Randles, Amanda Living people American computer scientists Duke University alumni Harvard University alumni Duke University faculty 21st-century American engineers 21st-century American women engineers Grace Murray Hopper Award laureates Year of birth missing (living people) American women academics