James is a former programmer and postgraduate student in law at the University of Tasmania. At present he is currently studying the intersection of intellectual property and regulatory regimes for bioinformatics and computational biology. Throughout his work as a programmer, James was perplexed as to how copyrights and patents could (in many cases) have such a prohibitive impact on FOSS development. At the same time, James became deeply interested in the FOSS movement and how its application inside and outside of software development could have lasting social implications. Accordingly, James is studying how open source licences and development practices can be applied within computational biology to help support a genomic research commons. This will be supported by law reform to adapt traditional intellectual property regimes for new and emerging advances in computer science. Prior to starting his postgraduate studies, James completed undergraduate degrees in computer science and law at the University of Tasmania. In his spare time, James contributes to the org.geppetto OpenWorm project, a web based simulation and visualisation project that models the neuroanatomy of the C Elegans nematode worm.