Dr. James M. Bower Ph.D. is the founder, Chairman of the Board and Chief Visionary Officer of Numedeon Inc., which in 1999 launched Whyville.net as one of the first virtual worlds for tweens. Whyville.net currently has more than 3.2 million registered users, and remains one of the few learning-based virtual worlds. Dr. Bower installed his first virtual world (in hypercard) in the Los Angeles Public Library in 1988 in a project associated with the Caltech Pre-College Science Initiative (CAPSI) which he founded and directed while
a faculty member at Caltech from 1985 to 2001. Dr. Bower was also an early educational consultant to Knowledge Adventure Inc, and the Internet incubator, Idealab. Dr. Bower has served on scientific and educational advisory committees for numerous organizations including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Society for Neuroscience.
Professionally, Dr. Bower is a computational neurobiologist