James Fairbanks is an Assistant Professor in the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department of the University of Florida. He earned his B.S. in Mathematics at the University of Florida and his Ph.D at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Computational Science and Engineering. He studied under the supervision of Professor David A. Bader, while supported by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. During his graduate studies, James applied numerical analysis to graph mining algorithms such as Spectral Clustering and Algebraic Graph Centralities to develop both theoretical results connecting numerical accuracy to data analysis quality and practical improvements to iterative solvers for said problems. He then worked at the Georgia Tech Research Institute on Data Analysis and High Performance Computing as applied to scientific computing and data science problems in healthcare. social science, epidemiology, biology, and physics problems. His work focuses on using programming language theory and algebraic techniques for designing and developing large scale software for technical computing problems. He has been a significant contributor to the Julia language for technical computing since 2015.