James Wanliss received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Alberta. For his dissertation he studied fast ion flows in the Earth's magnetotail under the direction of plasma physicists Gordon Rostoker and Richard Sydora.

He has done postdoctoral work at the Center for Data Analysis and Modelling at the University of Alberta, and was a Canadian Space Agency Research Scientist working on the Space Weather program. He is an associate professor of Physics at Presbyterian College. He has pursued Space Physics Research at the Japanese Space Agency, at the University of Washington, Seattle, UCLA, Kyung-Hee University (Korea) and Nagoya University (Japan).

Dr. Wanliss has extensive experience in observing and analyzing data from ground based experiments, particularly from magnetometers and electro-optical instruments. He has published articles in refereed physics and geophysics journals including the Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research letters, Annales Geophysicae, Earth Planets and Space, and Exploration Geophysics, Chaos Solitons Fractals, Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar Terrestrial Physics. He has also published in Reformed Perspective and Credo Quarterly Theological Journal. He is a member of the American Physical Society, American Geophysical Union, European Geophysical Union, Asia Oceania Geosciences Society, and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. He has won numerous awards for his research, most notably the NSF CAREER award.

Dr. Wanliss was an Elder in the Free Church of Scotland, a position resigned in January 2002. He speaks four languages, is a sometimes runner, avid reader, and with his wife Esther (Seung-Hyun Kang), a full-time parent of Grace Eun-Hye and Sophia Ji-Hye. His homepage is at http://web.presby.edu/~wanliss