Photo of Amanda Randles

Biotechnology & medicine

Amanda Randles

Personalized simulations of blood flow in the body.

Year Honored
2017

Organization
Duke University

Region
Global

Amanda Randles, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, is building software that simulates blood flowing throughout the human body in a model based on medical images of a particular person. The code base is called “HARVEY,” after William Harvey, a 17th-century surgeon who first described the circulatory system. The software requires a supercomputer to crunch calculations on the fluid dynamics of millions of blood cells as they move through the blood vessels. Randles has other plans for her fluid-dynamic model of the circulatory system. Next up: scanning newborns with heart problems to guide surgeons and predicting how cancer cells move through the body.

—Antonio Regalado