James is a Long Island, New York native and alumnus of the University of Rhode Island (URI). At URI, James completed his bachelor's, master's, and PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering.
His PhD dissertation work establishes a foundational body of knowledge about vote centers by characterizing voter turnout behavioral patterns that inherently affect resource allocation decisions. Furthermore, it broadens the scope of knowledge about using network analysis and community detection techniques to understand voters’ behavior when making site-selection decisions independently within an interconnected network. Lastly, it provides a novel facility location selection optimization approach using a genetic algorithm. Moreover, his master's thesis leverages the transaction logs of electronic poll book technology to obtain essential information about arrival behavior at individual polling places. The outcome provides a generalizable probabilistic approach for approximating the arrival rate of voters throughout the day and reports processing time characteristics.
While pursuing his advanced degrees, James worked as a Graduate Research Assistant for Dr. Gretchen Macht at the Engineering for Democracy Institute (formerly URI VOTES). He was crucial in developing cutting-edge statistical and simulation models to assist local election administrators with multi-site (city, county, and state-wide) resource allocation and capacity planning that impacted approximately 28.6 million voters across nine states. This includes accessing the quantity and placement of vote centers, vote-by-mail dropboxes, and other physical resources. James was a core contributor to several bespoke and open-source tools (using Python, R, or VBA) to streamline the analysis of various election data to provide actionable insights for future election planning. He also trained others and participated in time studies of multiple states' in-person and vote-by-mail processes and Risk-Limiting Audits.
In his personal time, James enjoys reading, traveling, and training for triathlons.