James C. Liao is an Associate Professor of biology at the University of Florida and the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, where he is also an Affiliate Professor in the Clayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering and an Affiliate Curator of Ichthyology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. His research integrates approaches from engineering, neuroscience and physiology to understand the fundamental principles of animal sensing and locomotion. In particular, he is interested in understanding how fishes behave from the perspective of multiple biological levels, from single neurons to group behavior. James received his B.A. magna cum laude in Biology from Wesleyan University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Biomechanics from Harvard University. He was then an NIH postdoc and Research Associate in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University. He has won research awards from The Society for Experimental Biology and the American Society for Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, and has been recognized multiple times by the Derek Bok Center for Excellence in Teaching at Harvard.
