Bio

An esteemed computer scientist and theorist, Dana Randall is the director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center (ARC), the ADVANCE Professor of Computing and an adjunct professor for the School of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech, she also is co-director of the strategic initiative in Data Engineering and Science. Her fields of interest are theoretical computer science, randomized algorithms, combinatorics, stochastic processes and simulations of physical systems. The primary focus of her work is the design and analysis of efficient sampling algorithms based on Markov chains.

Randall earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Harvard University and her doctorate in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) in Princeton, New Jersey. She has served on the editorial boards of the Annals of Applied Probability, the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, and the Theory of Computing. She chaired of the program committee for the ACM/SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms in 2011 and will co-chair the SIAM Conference on Discrete Mathematics in Atlanta, June 2016.  In 2012, she became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and in 2007, she was named a national associate of the National Academies.