Helen Frances James (born May 22, 1956) is an American paleontologist and paleornithologist who has published extensively on the fossil birds of the Hawaiian Islands.
She is the curator in charge of birds in the Department of Vertebrate Zoology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.[1] James was born in a U.S. Army hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas on May 22, 1956, to two ecologists.
The study of Hawaii's fossil birds, of which there were an abundance of undescribed species, became a long-term collaborative research program for James and Olson.
[1][4] In 2000, James earned a DPhil in zoology from the University of Oxford,[2][5] with a dissertation on the comparative osteology and phylogeny of the Hawaiian finches (Drepanidini).
She has also conducted research on the fossil vertebrates and paleoecology of Madagascar, the comparative osteology and phylogenetics of perching birds, and the evolution of island waterfowl.