James Glazier

Adjunct Professor of Informatics

E-mail
Phone: (812) 855-3735
Fax: (812) 855-5533
Office: Swain Hall West 159
Web Site: biocomplexity.indiana.edu/jglazier

Other Titles

Adjunct Professor of Informatics
Adjunct Professor of Biology
Director, Biocomplexity Institute

Research Interests

Computational Developmental Biology Mathematical Developmental Biology Experimental Biophysics of Development Microfabrications and Biosensors Microfluidics Liquid Foams Model Sharing

Research Projects

Development of CompuCell3D modeling environment for compact descriptions of biological development. Modeling of developmental phenomena including biofilms, tumor growth, gastrulation, somitogenesis, limb growth and angiogenesis.

Education

1989: Ph.D. in Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Thesis advisor Prof. Albert Libchaber. Title: Dynamics of Cellular Patterns. 1987: M.A. in Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL. 1984: B.A. in Physics and Mathematics, magna cum laude, Harvard College, Cambridge, MA.

Biography

I finished my Ph.D. under the direction of Prof. Albert Libchaber in the summer of 1989 with a thesis on soap bubbles that proved surprisingly successful (At that time it was written up by the New York Times and, over the years I've had more than 200 requests for reprints of it). After my graduation, I immediately went to Perth, Australia, where I spent a semester as a visiting fellow at the University of Western Australia working on foams with Prof. Brian Kenny in the Department of Physics. I had the chance to lecture in New Zealand and at many universities in Australia (as well as a chance for some tourism in the South Pacific).

I returned from Australia to start a postdoctoral position in fluid dynamics at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Quite soon I became more interested in biological physics problems and had the chance to do some training in neuroscience with Dr. David Tank also at AT&T. When I finished at AT&T, I did some additional neuroscience training at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA and spent some time at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, working with Prof. Denis Weaire on foams. I also began a visiting position in Molecular Epidemiology in the Laboratory of Prof. Mark Skolnick at the University of Utah, where I cosupervised a graduate student doing DNA sequence analysis. The Utah connection lasted for several years.

From 1991-1993 I held an NSF fellowship at Tohoku University, in Sendai, Japan in the laboratory of Prof. Yasuji Sawada. Most of my later work derives from projects that I initiated in that period, when I started working on developmental-biology experiments and simulations of Hydra regeneration. I still use a distant descendent of the simulation code I wrote in a single afternoon in Sendai. I also formed close research links with my labmates Dr. Francois Graner (now at the University of Grenoble) and Dr. Masaki Sano (now at Tokyo University). With Sano, I went on to do a series of experiments on high-Rayleigh number turbulence in liquid mercury (which were eventually published in Nature). I continued to spend my summers in Japan, as well as a sabbatical year, until Sawada retired a few years ago. I also spent a sabbatical in Grenoble with Francois and continue to collaborate with him on X-ray tomography studies of three-dimensional foams at the ESRF synchrotron light source in Grenoble.

In 1993, I started as an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame and was very nearly the shortest-lived professor on record there. Taking the train from Hyde Park to South Bend, I was in a train crash which killed everyone else in the carriage in which I was riding.

At Notre Dame, supported by an NSF National Young Investigator award, I started work on the properties and kinetics of fractally-coupled networks, especially in the brain. At the time, the work was judged unfundable and I turned to more conventional problems in developmental biology.

Instead, I continued with my development research and became involved in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (I secured funding for the purchase of a high-field imager at Notre Dame and installed and ran it for several years). I also wrote (and was successful with) one of the first NSF Biocomplexity proposals (on limb development in chick), which led to a long-lasting interdisciplinary collaboration with a mathematician (Dr. Mark Alber) and a computer scientist at Notre Dame, a theoretical physicist at Emory University, an experimental biophysicist at University of Missouri Columbia and an experimental biologist at New York Medical College. That grant eventually led to the creation of a Biocomplexity Center at Notre Dame and the initiation of an ongoing workshop series on Biocomplexity. It also led, to an invitation in 2002 to move, as full professor, to Indiana University, Bloomington, to set up a Biophysics/Biocomplexity program. I have been here since 2002, as Director of the Biocomplexity Institute, trying to fulfill that responsibility.

During the past ten years I have had nine students complete their Ph.D.s with me. Another two will graduate this year. I've supervised many postdocs, undergraduates and high-school students and had the chance to lecture in more than twenty countries.

Most recently I founded a biotechnology company, SpheroSense Technologies, Inc., to commercialize a miniature biosensor developed jointly with Prof. Bogdan Dragnea of the Department of Chemistry here and my graduate student Mr. Dragos Amarie.