Amanda Randles wants to copy your body. If the computer scientist had her way, she’d have enough data — and processing power — to effectively clone you on her computer, run the clock forward, and see what your coronary arteries or red blood cells might do in a week. Fully personalized medical simulations, or “digital twins,” are still beyond our abilities, but Randles has pioneered computer models of blood flow over long durations that are already helping doctors noninvasively diagnose and treat diseases.

As a teen in 1990s Michigan, Randles already imagined a career that blended coding and biology. After graduating from Duke University with a physics and computer science degree, she tinkered with Blue Gene supercomputers during a three-year stint at IBM. She then went on to get her doctorate in applied physics at Harvard University. While there, she built a blood circulation model named Harvey that she eventually moved to her own digital-twin lab at Duke. In April, she won the Association for Computing Machinery Prize in Computing — and $250,000 — for her groundbreaking research.

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