James C. T. Pool retired from the California Institute of Technology in 2005 after serving as in leadership roles at Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) since 1993.  While at CACR, he served as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on numerous projects supported by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation, including Caltech’s participation in the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and the TeraGrid.  Earlier, at Argonne National Laboratory, he was responsible for the applied mathematics and computer science research program, including the research group that produced EISPACK, LINPACK, FUNPACK, and MINPACK.  He directed basic research programs at the DOE Office of Energy Research and the DOD Office of Naval Research and in both organizations introduced research programs in high performance computing focused on computational science and engineering. 
Academic positions have included professor of mathematics and computer science and department head at Drexel University.

He served as Executive Vice President, Numerical Algorithms Group, Inc. from 1982 to 1988, responsible for NAG's North American activities including interactions with the numerical software research community, major user sites, and high performance system vendors.   He continues interactions with NAG in a technical advisor role.  He presented the AGM/24 Lecture, Software: The Grand Challenge of High Performance Computing.

He has been a member of the International Federation on Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group on Numerical Software (IFIP WG 2.5) from 1974 to 1978 and again since 1996. After serving on the Organizing Committee for WG 2.5 in 1973-74, he was the initial WG 2.5 Chair from 1974 until 1978. He was the Chair of the IFIP Working Conference on Grid-based Problem Solving Environments: Implications for Devlopment and Deployment of Numerical Software held July 17-21, 2006 in Prescott, AZ.

After pursuing research and its management for over forty years, he is now applying the accumulated experience in consulting activities focused on high performance computing and its application in computational science and engineering.