James Fairbanks, Ph.D., 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.

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.