About

I'm James, an applied scientist and ML leader. I take AI from research to production in high-stakes healthcare, where the answer has to be right and you have to be able to show why.

At Infinia ML, the AI arm of revenue-cycle company Aspirion, I'm Manager of AI/ML Applied Science and lead the ContractIQ and Pricing & Scoring teams. I've shaped ContractIQ from its earliest design through to production. It turns complex payer contracts into structured, auditable reimbursement logic, so providers can see exactly what they should be paid and catch underpayments. Pricing & Scoring uses ML to find the denied and underpaid claims most worth appealing. Across both, my job is setting technical direction and building a team that brings real rigor to revenue integrity.

The thread runs back further than healthcare finance. I started with signals from motion: sensors inside footballs at Wilson, then heart rate and cuffless blood pressure from wearables at Valencell. My PhD at Duke moved inside the body, building deep-learning methods for MRI that measure how spinal discs respond to load. At Bionic Health (now Thrive Wellness), I led Data Science & AI and worked as an ML engineer across the whole platform: a custom health record, web and mobile apps for patients and clinicians, risk models built on imaging, labs and wearable data, and an LLM assistant that let people explore their own health data on the fly.

How I build teams

I want a team that dares to dream big and knows how to check its assumptions. Those sound like opposites; they aren't. Ambition sets the target: the system that's ten times better, not the prototype that's slightly easier. Rigor keeps us honest on the way there: write the assumption down, find the fastest way to prove it wrong, and let the evidence change the plan.

The third piece is collaboration. In healthcare, the people who understand the problem best are rarely the people writing the code: the analyst who has read a thousand contracts, the clinician who knows which number matters at 2 a.m. The best ML teams I've been part of treat those people as co-designers, not end users.

I live in Durham, North Carolina, with my wife, in a century home we've been restoring. Off the clock I'm training, taking photos, or in section 113 for a Canes game.