Raised in Indiana farm country, Jamie's father ran an apple orchard and
his mother was a librarian. Other than being a prolific reader and having
a penchant for creative ways of avoiding chores around the farm, Jamie showed no hint of what was to come.

After Jamie hitch‐hiked around the country for a number of months by
himself at the age of 14, his parents insisted that if he was going to be that adventurous they wanted him to have some formal survival training, which
he went through in the wilderness in Wyoming. Jamie acquired a taste for disappearing into the wilderness for weeks at a time, which he did periodically for decades after.

Graduating from Indiana University with a degree in Russian, and having worked as a cook on a cattle farm, as a pet‐store owner, a building inspector, and a Slavic collection librarian at the United Nations in Geneva, Jamie decided to go to the Caribbean and work on a charter sailboat. Six months later he owned his own boat, obtained his captain's license and dive masters rating, and was running his own diving and sailing charter business. Four years of captaining in the islands proved to be a great teacher, but also eventually became a routine. Jamie sailed back up to the states, regrouped and thought carefully about what he wanted to do. He decided to try his hand at special effects. The diversity of the work and the creativity required intrigued him, so he methodically went about acquiring the required skills, starting as a simple shop assistant. Within 2 years in the New York City area, Jamie had worked on several feature films and dozens of commercials, several of which he supervised. At this point he decided he needed to make the next leap and moved to the San Francisco bay area in California to get on the crew of some effects intensive major feature films. Over the years he worked on Robocop, Arachnophobia, Naked Lunch, and numerous other films until he was hired to manage the Colossal Pictures model shop in San Francisco. After several years of involvement with Colossal, Jamie was offered the opportunity to take over the model shop when Colossal was forced to downsize during the dot com bust. This is how M5 Industries was born. Jamie evolved M5 into a successful versatile effects business that has specialized in problematic custom builds for over 12 years.

Through the course of his 25 years of work in the effects industry, Jamie
has had his hand in producing effects for over 800 commercials, dozens
of feature films, and hundreds of prototypes. He holds several patents, numerous of awards for effects projects, and along with having co‐hosted Mythbusters with Adam Savage through over 100 episodes, has been keeping a steady flow of R&D projects running in the background at M5.

Jamie lives in San Francisco with his wife of 20 years, who teaches science in the bay area.