Jim‘s bond with the ocean was cemented at an early age as he was born on a boat in south Florida and didn’t live on land until age 11.  After getting SCUBA-certified at age 12 and getting some exposure to oceanography that summer at Sea Camp, he began exploring the oceans and has been diving every year since.  He continued the summer-camp-for-nerds theme the following summer at the first-ever Robotics camp.  He had no idea that these two interests would converge many years later in the frozen land of Antarctica in the SCINI project.

Also during his teenage years, Jim became obsessed with computers and digital electronics.  By the time he started college, he had designed and built five microprocessor-based systems.  After two miserable years of college, he left for the nerd shangri-la of Silicon Valley, where he spent 12 years as a digital design engineer in companies ranging from behemoths like Sun and Cisco to tiny startups like Divicom and Granite Systems.  He left the corporate world in 2001 to goof off full-time, and spends his time traveling, flying his plane, SCUBA diving, snowboarding, and otherwise enjoying the outdoors.

Jim enjoying the clear warm waters of Thailand.