A/Prof Clancy W. James leads the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy's involvement in the Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transients (CRAFT) Survey on the Australian Square Kiklometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). His primary research interest is in fast radio bursts (FRB) - enigmatic pulses of radio waves lasting about a millisecond that arrive at the Earth from gaalxies billions of light-years away - and how they can be used to study the Universe. He is the author of the "zDM" code for relating the FRB dispersion measure - caused by passage through ionised gas - to their host galaxy redshift, which probes the large-scale structure of the Universe.

A/Prof James completed his PhD, titled Ultra-High-Energy Particle Detection with the Lunar Cherenov Technique, at the University of Adelaide in 2009, under the supervision of Ray Protheroe and Ron Ekers. For this he was awarded the 2010 Bragg Gold Medal by the Australian Institue of Physics, and the 2010 Postgraduate Alumni University Medal by University of Adelaide.

A/Prof James then worked at Radboud University Nijmegen, in The Netherlands, on cosmic ray detection with the LOFAR radio telescope, from 2009-2011, under Prof Heino Falcke. His major contribution during this period was developing the 'Endpoints' formalism for calculating the radio-wave radiation emitted by high-energy particle cascades, which is now part of the CoREAS package within the CORSIKA code. He then moved to the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg in Germany, working on the ANTARES and KM3NeT underwater neutrino telescopes from 2011 to 2017. During this period, he led the KM3NeT Simulations Working Group, and co-led the task force that brought about the KM3NeT Letter of Intent, placing that instrument on the European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructure's roadmap. He also founded the Square Kilometre Array's High Energy Cosmic Particle Science Working Group, co-chairing it for several years, before moving to Perth and Curtin University in 2017.

A/Prof James also holds a degree in economics, and lectures Electromagnetism (PHYS 2005) and Nuclear and Particle Physics (PHYS 3007) for Curtin University.