S6E5: Amanda Randles: A Check-Engine Light for the Heart

Science in Parallel

Duke University associate professor Amanda Randles' work to simulate and understand human blood flow and its implications demonstrates how high-performance computing paired with scientific principles can help improve human health. In this conversation, she talks about how she brought together early interests in physics, coding, biomedicine and even political science and policy and followed her enthusiasm for the Human Genome Project. She discusses how supercomputers are pushing the boundaries of what researchers can learn about the circulatory system noninvasively and how that knowledge, paired with data from wearable devices, could lead to new ways to monitor and treat patients. She also talks about her public engagement and science policy work and its importance, both for educating patients and supporting computational science’s future.

You’ll meet:

Amanda Randles is the Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai associate professor of biomedical sciences at Duke University and director of Duke’s Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation. Her research using high-performance computing to model the fluid dynamics of blood flow has garnered numerous awards including one of the inaugural Sony Women in Technology Awards with Nature , the 2024 ISC Jack Dongarra Early Career Award and the 2023 ACM Prize in Computing. Amanda completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University working with Efthimios Kaxiras and Hanspeter Pfister. She was a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) recipient from 2010 to 2013 and a Lawrence Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 2013 to 2015.

Follow Amanda on social media: LinkedIn, BlueSky and Instagram.