Spring 2026 Reflection from the Director

As we close out the Spring 2026 semester at the Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation (CCDHI), I have been reflecting on how much the Center has grown not only in size and visibility but also in the depth of conversations, collaborations, and ideas emerging across our community.

This semester reinforced something I believe deeply about computational and digital health innovation: the future of healthcare will not be shaped by a single technology or discipline. It will emerge from the intersection of many fields working together in new ways. Over the past few months, we saw that intersection come alive through seminars, trainee discussions, publications, awards, and collaborations spanning AI, imaging, wearables, robotics, computational modeling, and clinical translation.

We convened our Communities of Practice this spring, bringing together trainees, faculty, clinicians, and researchers to discuss the continued development of the CCDHI Certificate Program and opportunities for interdisciplinary training. The conversation highlighted the strong interest across Duke in creating educational experiences that connect computational methods, digital technologies, and healthcare applications. These discussions are an important part of the Center’s mission to build a collaborative community that spans traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Our spring seminar series reflected the remarkable range of innovation occurring across the field. 

• Monica Agrawal opened the semester with a thoughtful discussion on the responsible use of large language models in healthcare, raising important questions about trust, misinformation, and patient communication in the age of generative AI.
• Later in the semester, Boyuan Chen’s seminar, “Discovery Machines: From Pixels to Physics,” explored systems capable of uncovering governing equations directly from visual observations. It was one of those talks that leaves you thinking not only about what AI can do today, but what scientific discovery itself may look like in the future.
• Dan Ma’s seminar on quantitative MRI and MRI fingerprinting highlighted another major theme emerging across healthcare innovation: the blending of physics, imaging, and AI. Seeing how computational approaches are enabling richer characterization of tissue and disease made it clear just how quickly precision imaging is advancing.

One of the defining moments of the semester was welcoming Dr. Christopher Cheng for our first in-person seminar. His discussion connected vascular biomechanics, medical device innovation, and entrepreneurship through examples of how understanding vascular motion can improve device design and patient care. We closed the semester with Dr. Pengfei Song’s seminar on super-resolution ultrasound imaging and microvascular visualization, demonstrating how advances in ultrafast imaging, 3D reconstruction, and AI-guided ultrasound are opening entirely new possibilities for understanding vascular biology and disease.

For anyone who missed these seminars, I encourage you to visit our YouTube channel and watch the recordings. One of our goals as a Center is not simply to host conversations, but to make these ideas and discussions broadly accessible to the larger community.

Our Espresso Chat series also became one of the highlights of the semester. Designed as smaller and more personal conversations, these sessions gave students the opportunity to directly engage with leaders working at the forefront of digital health, AI, entrepreneurship, and industry.

• Gina Lee shared insights from her work on model evaluation and AI systems at Abridge and previously at Microsoft AI, offering students a window into how large language models are being developed, evaluated, and deployed in real-world healthcare settings. 
• Ron Alfa, Co-Founder and CEO of NOETIK, discussed how multimodal foundation models trained on large-scale tumor data are being used to advance precision oncology and therapeutic discovery. 
• Christopher Cheng’s Espresso Chat extended the themes of innovation and translation introduced in his seminar, creating space for open discussion around entrepreneurship, career paths, and building technologies that can directly impact patient care.

One thing that has genuinely stood out to me this semester has been the level of student engagement during these Espresso Chats. Every session quickly developed a waitlist, and students consistently arrived prepared with thoughtful, serious questions. The conversations often extended well beyond the scheduled time because of how engaged everyone was. It has been incredibly rewarding to watch students take advantage of these opportunities to connect directly with people shaping the future of computational and digital health innovation.

Beyond the seminar series, this semester highlighted the extraordinary accomplishments of our students and trainees. We were proud to celebrate our graduating students and their projects through Graduation with Departmental Distinction (GWDD) posters presented this spring, which showcased research ranging from AI-driven drug discovery to immune engineering and wearable health technologies. Watching students develop the confidence to tackle increasingly interdisciplinary problems continues to be one of the most rewarding aspects of building this community.

The Center also saw tremendous research momentum this year, with 32 publications already in 2026 spanning digital twins, oncology, medical imaging, robotics, wearable sensing, neuroscience, and clinical AI.

Several papers particularly reflected the interdisciplinary and longitudinal perspective that defines CCDHI. 

• David Ashley and collaborators published “A longitudinal, multi-omic atlas reveals the emergence of a spatially organized immunosuppressive ecosystem in resistant melanoma” in Cell Reports Medicine, an ambitious effort integrating longitudinal profiling, spatial biology, and computational analysis to better understand mechanisms of therapeutic resistance.
• This spring also saw the publication of our Nature Reviews Bioengineering review on digital twins and longitudinal healthcare, which explored how multimodal data integration, wearable technologies, physics-based modeling, and AI are converging to reshape proactive and personalized medicine.
• Jessilyn Dunn and collaborators additionally published work in Nature Health demonstrating that while daylight saving time shifts do not significantly alter total daily step counts, they do influence when people are active throughout the day. It is a powerful example of how large-scale wearable data can uncover subtle patterns in human behavior and physiology that are difficult to capture through traditional clinical studies alone.

This semester also brought recognition for many members of the CCDHI community. 

• Nusrat Sadia Khan was honored with the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for her commitment and contributions to BME 307.
• Alexander Armstrong and Perisa Ashar received National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships.
• Geena-Luise Buentipo won The Helmholtz Award for best research project by a senior BME at Duke.
• Many labs participated in Discover Engineering @ Duke, part of the North Carolina Science Festival.

On a personal note, I was deeply honored this semester to be elected to the AIMBE College of Fellows. More than anything, moments like these reflect the strength of the broader community surrounding the Center and the collaborative environment that continues to grow here at Duke.

We continued to support pilot collaborations that reflect the Center’s mission of connecting emerging technologies with real-world healthcare challenges. This year marked the launch of our first two pilot projects, which explored topics ranging from wearable-enabled approaches for improving diabetes management to new data-driven frameworks for advancing youth concussion research. Together, these efforts highlight the breadth of applications and interdisciplinary collaborations emerging across the CCDHI community.

What stands out most as I reflect on the semester is the sense that computational and digital health innovation is no longer a future vision sitting at the edges of healthcare. It is becoming an increasingly integrated part of how we understand disease, monitor health, develop therapies, and support patients over time.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the Center this semester, whether through research, mentorship, seminars, collaboration, outreach, or simply showing up and engaging in these conversations. The community surrounding CCDHI continues to grow in remarkable ways, and I am incredibly grateful to be building it together.

— Amanda Randles
Director, Center for Computational and Digital Health Innovation