Bio
With professional experience spanning business strategy, service design, product development, and customer research, James thrives at building and scaling innovative ideas. Currently, as a Senior Service Design Lead at Edward Jones, James guides multidisciplinary teams of senior leaders through the design, development, and implementation of holistic, integrated experiences for a network of 20,000 financial advisors, impacting over 8 million clients across the US and Canada.
Previously, as Business Development Lead for NuVuX, an EdTech startup launched out of MIT, James developed and managed partnerships with major school districts and schools in the US and around the world.
During his masters at MIT, he traveled throughout India researching alternative roofing systems for earthquake-prone regions, helped facilitate a participatory design and planning workshop in an informal neighborhood in Cartagena, Colombia, taught design and entrepreneurship in Mongolia to high school and university students, and produced a collaborative thesis on the role of design to reduce mass incarceration in the United States. These experiences cultivated an expertise in tackling real-world issues by working across the boundaries of disciplines, creating new partnerships, and directly engaging local communities in the process of innovation.
James completed a B.S. in Architectural Studies with university honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014, and a Master of Architecture from MIT in 2018.