Alumna’s Circulatory Modeling Earns CAREER Award

The National Science Foundation has chosen a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) alumna for a 2020 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.

Amanda Randles, the Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Duke University, will use the five-year, $500,000 grant to build and improve supercomputer simulations of how fluids interact with various cellular structures in the human body.

The CAREER award recognizes outstanding young faculty in the sciences. Randles, a fellow from 2010-2013, has established a record of distinguished research in modeling the human circulatory system. In particular, she and her group developed HARVEY, a massively parallel simulation of the arterial system at subcellular resolution.

The grant will let Randles and her team develop a model that specifically explores how different bodies, like red blood cells and immune cells, and particles interact as they flow through fluid, a Duke release says. When connected to virtual reality devices, the new framework will give researchers the chance to explore how mechanical properties influence various cells and particles as they spread through blood vessels. The high-performance computing scheme could provide insights into sickle-cell anemia, malaria and other conditions.

Randles earned her undergraduate degree in physics and computer science from Duke in 2005 and her Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard University in 2013.