James Bower

James M. Bower is a Visiting Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Bio-computation Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire, UK as well as an Affiliate Professor of Biology at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon.  He was previously a professor in the University of Texas System and at the California Institute of Technology.  He received his PhD from the Department of Neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and completed postdoctoral studies in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at New York University and at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. 
 
Dr. Bower’s research in Computational Neuroscience has focused on the physiological and functional organization of cortical structures in the mammalian brain including both the cerebral (olfactory) cortex and the cerebellum. He has been actively involved in the development of scientific infrastructure including the GENESIS neural simulation system, as well as founding several scientific meetings and journals including the annual international meeting in Computational Neuroscience (CNS) and summer courses in Computational Neuroscience in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.  He is also one of the founding editors of the Journal of Computational Neuroscience and was one of the original organizers of the NIPS (now NeurIPS) meeting in Neural Information Processing Systems. 
 
In addition to his scientific interests, Dr. Bower also has a long-standing interest and involvement in science education and educational innovation. For 17 years he co-directed the Caltech Precollege Science Initiative (CAPSI) and in 1999 he founded the virtual game-based learning world for children Whyville.net, now with more than 8 million registered users worldwide, which he continues to manage as CEO of Numedeon Inc. 
 
Dr. Bower is currently making an effort to simulate a 19th century landed gentry scientist while managing Sundance Farms with holdings in Southern and Central Oregon and on the Oregon Coast, while also working on a manuscript describing the development of the structure of matter over the last 13.7 billion years.