James McLurkin (born 1972) is a Senior Hardware Engineer at Google.
[1] Previously, he was an engineering assistant professor at Rice University specializing in swarm robotics.
In 2005, he appeared on an episode of PBS' Nova[2] and is a winner of the 2003 Lemelson-MIT Prize.
Previously, he earned his master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and B.S.
As part of his doctoral research, McLurkin developed algorithms and techniques for programming "swarms" of autonomous robots to mimic the behavior of bees, including their abilities to cluster, disperse, follow, and orbit.