Applied physics PhD student Amanda Peters Randles showcases what “interdisciplinary” means today
Every scholar recognizes the force of “interdisciplinarity” in today’s academy and acknowledges the appeal of new dialogues and collaborations between disciplines long discrete. But for most, interdisciplinarity is still a pursuit carried out from the security of a fixed departmental perch and professional identity. And yet a new type of scholar is emerging — one whose work can be characterized less by the disciplines linked than by the links themselves. Amanda Peters Randles is that kind of scholar.
In July 2012, Peters Randles was one of 100 American graduate students selected to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, an annual conference in Germany that brings aspiring researchers into close contact with the world’s top scientists. A PhD candidate in computational physics, specializing in blood flow, she probably could have been forgiven for tuning out when one laureate, an astronomer, began speaking about his work charting the universe’s expansion. Instead, she began taking frantic notes.
“A lot of the equations he was giving were exactly what we’re using. I was like, ‘Oh, this is great!’”
A member of Efthimios Kaxiras’s lab, Peters Randles’s doctoral work involves intricate cardiovascular modeling, so it’s not too surprising that she works closely with computer scientists and doctors in the Boston area. But in her quest to identify the specific regions of a patient’s heart most vulnerable to failure, she’s also enlisted the help of coders at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, support and visualization technicians at the Argonne and Livermore national laboratories, Lattice-Boltzmann fluid dynamics specialists in Italy, and even an engineer working with Pixar to improve the bendable joints of action figures. “You have a grid that defines the geometry of the arteries, and that’s exactly what he’s doing with a grid for defining the geography of his fabricated characters,” she explained.
The trickiest thing about the new class of eclectic scholars represented by Peters Randles may be figuring out their job descriptions. What do you call a physicist using advanced computer programs to change cardiology?
Cosmology, then, is only the latest in a long series of disciplines Randles has tapped in the course of her research. This incredible range was recognized at Lindau 2012, when Mars, Inc. chose her for a panel it hosted on “Collaboration in Science,” alongside Nobel laureate Dudley Herschbach, PhD ’58, an emeritus professor of Harvard’s chemistry department, and Christopher Nagel, founder of Continuum Energy Technologies in Fall River, MA. “There was some debate about choosing me,” Peters Randles said. “They weren’t sure if they wanted everyone from Boston.” The panel was moderated by Adam Smith, editorial director of Nobel Media, whom Peters Randles described as “the second person who calls when you win the Nobel Prize.”
Speaking in front of 150 other young researchers, Peters Randles described the privileged position occupied by graduate students, still in the fluid phase of their careers, in an academy being transformed by increasing cross-disciplinary collaboration. She also discussed the challenges of making a project attractive to potential collaborators, and of finding the right people to work with.
Coordinating as much diverse expertise as she does, it is sometimes easy for Peters Randles to forget what her own is. “I’m trying to get my PhD in applied physics, but I keep getting sucked back in to fix something that went wrong with, you know, the computer science.” The problem is compounded by the fact that Peters Randles double-majored in physics and computer science at Duke, and worked for IBM before coming to Harvard. “So getting back to focusing on physics, and trying to get some physics publications — that side has been difficult.” Which is where the cosmology comes in: her lab is currently at work on a paper that borrows equations used to model the universe’s expansion to describe forces generated by the changing curvature of arteries.
The trickiest thing about the new class of eclectic scholars represented by Peters Randles may be figuring out their job descriptions. What do you call a physicist using advanced computer programs to change cardiology? With footholds in so many fields, one challenge Peters Randles will have to face without collaboration is how to define her own future as a scientist. She plans to finish her PhD next year, and describes her career prospects as wide open. “Every other day I change my mind,” she says. As she turns toward the stars for clues to the mysteries of the human heart, even “astrologer” seems an appropriate title.
Story credit: Nicholas Nardini
Photo credit: Risa Kawai