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 hitchhiked 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, where 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 two years in Greater New York City, Jamie had worked on and supervised several feature films and dozens of commercials. 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 ��" and M5 Industries was born. Jamie evolved M5 into a successful versatile effects business that has specialized in problematic custom builds for over 15 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.

Although MythBusters occupies the majority of M5's focus today, Jamie manages to keep a steady flow of R&D projects running in the background. The holder of several patents and the winner of numerous industry awards, Jamie is also a long-standing member of the Screen Actor’s Guild.

Jamie has been awarded an honorary engineering degree from the University of Maine, and an honorary doctorate of engineering from Villanova University, where he gave the commencement speech to the Class of 2010. He and Villanova's College of Engineering have an ongoing collaborative relationship to develop new safety concepts for the military. In 2011, he and Adam also received honorary doctorates from the Univeriteit Twente (Netherlands) for their role in popularizing science and technology.

2012 saw the premiere of Unchained Reaction on Discovery Channel, a reality competition show that pits two teams against each other to create the ultimate chain reaction machine. Jamie and Adam serve as executive producers and judges.  They also announced their partnership with Tested.com, which has been rebranded to be the online home of everything Jamie and Adam approved.

Jamie and Adam are currently on their first ever national MythBusters: Behind the Myths Tour, a live stage version of their popular show that invites audience participation in their exciting brand of science. Virtually every stop has sold out. They also travel the country to corporate events, museums, and colleges, for groups as small as 20 and   as large as 20,000, telling tales of experiments, explosions, and hijinks.

Jamie is a voracious reader and admittedly doesn't watch much television. His wife has been a high school science teacher in the Bay Area for 15 years, and students from her school were recently chosen for participation in the Archimedes experiment requested by President Obama. A true inventor at heart, Jamie can usually be found at M5 refining his latest ideas alongside his large and loveable canine.