Dana Randall is an American computer scientist. She works as the ADVANCE Professor of Computing, and adjunct professor of mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also an External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Previously she was executive director of the Georgia Tech Institute of Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) that she co-founded, and director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center. Her research include combinatorics, computational aspects of statistical mechanics, Monte Carlo stimulation of Markov chains, and randomized algorithms.

Education

Randall was born in Queens, New York. She graduated from New York City's Stuyvesant High School in 1984. She received her A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University in 1988 and her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994 under the supervision of Alistair Sinclair. Her sister is theoretical physicist Lisa Randall.

Research

Her primary research interest is analyzing algorithms for counting problems (e.g. counting matchings in a graph) using Markov chains. One of her important contributions to this area is a decomposition theorem for analyzing Markov chains.

Accolades

In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. She delivered her Arnold Ross Lecture on October 29, 2009, an honor previously conferred on Barry Mazur, Elwyn Berlekamp, Ken Ribet, Manjul Bhargava, David Kelly and Paul Sally.

Publications