James B. Bassingthwaighte, Professor of Bioengineering, Biomathematics and Radiology at the University of Washington, is currently the Editor of the Annals of Biomedical Engineering and Chairman of the Commission on Bioengineering in Physiology, International Union of Physiological Sciences. He received his BA and MD from the University of Toronto. Following post-graduate work in Medicine and Cardiology at the Postgraduate Medical School of London, he obtained his Ph.D. in Physiology from the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine. Dr. Bassingthwaighte joined the Mayo faculty, advancing to Professor of Physiology and of Medicine. He came to the University of Washington in 1975, serving as Director of the Center for Bioengineering for 5 years. He is Affiliate Professor of Physiology at Universiteit Maastricht, The Netherlands. Dr. Bassingthwaighte is the recipient of numerous awards such as an NIH Research Career Development Award, the Louis and Arthur Lucian Award of McGill University, the Alza Award of the Biomedical Engineering Society and the Burlington Resources Foundation Faculty Achievement Award for Research.

His current research is centered on the mechanisms of flow, transport, and metabolism of substrates and hormones in the heart and throughout the body. The work emphasizes the use of quantitative mathematical models for integrative systems analysis in physiology and in image analysis; he serves as Director of the National Simulation Resource for Circulatory Mass Transport and Exchange.

Dr. Bassingthwaighte is the originator of the Human Physiome Project, a large-scale international program for developing databasing and biological systems modeling for understanding genomic and pharmaceutic effects on human physiology. His program is highly collaborative, involving co-investigators at a dozen U.S. universities, several in Europe, and in 14 departments at the University of Washington. Some of these are involved in the Physiome Project, in particular the Cardiome Project. The Cardiome Project, to define a functional heart in mathematical terms, extends from the biochemistry and the signalling, to the mechanics and energetics of the three-dimensional visualizable heart.