Before joining FLI, James was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Governance of AI and conducted technical work for the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy and the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Earlier, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Oxford Big Data Institute, where he worked on modeling and designing interventions for pandemic defense.
He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, for research on decentralized digital contact tracing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he co-founded a nonprofit to prototype the technology, and the underlying approach was later deployed, reaching close to 100 million people. He also holds a Master’s in Computational Mathematics and a BASc in Engineering Physics, and previously worked as a Firmware Engineer at Intel.