A native New Yorker, James received dual Bachelors of Arts degrees with honors and Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University in Physics and Computer Science. He was a Presidential Fellow at Brown University where he earned his Masters of Science with honors and Sigma Xi in Computer Science. He completed his doctoral studies in Computer Science with a dissertation in Human Interface Technology under Mark Billinghurst at the University of Canterbury. He created a system for cooperative photography as a postdoctoral researcher in Interaction Design at Chalmers University / Göteborg Universitet and studied how people may empathize with robots as a research fellow at the United States Air Force Academy. In addition to academic research, James has extensive experience in industry from as a researcher at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights and as a senior developer at Amazon.com. He has also founded technology startups in New York, Seattle, and most recently, in Helsinki, Finland. James enjoys sketching when he is able to find the time, playing music when he's not bothering anyone, and traveling when his feet are itchy--which they often are--even after taking him to over 75 countries.