James Rhodes

James Rhodes oversees the Direct Platform and the broader Data and Analytics segment, which includes Morningstar’s flagship application Morningstar Direct^SM, as well as Morningstar Advisor Workstation^SM, Direct Advisory Suite, our Intelligence Engine AI solutions, and the delivery of Morningstar’s unique data and research to clients through data feeds, APIs, and Direct Web Services.

Upon joining Morningstar in 2016, Rhodes served as chief data officer before assuming his current position. In this role, he was responsible for defining Morningstar’s overall data technology strategy, which encompasses how Morningstar collects, processes, and distributes data to our clients. Rhodes is an expert at understanding complex legacy software architectures and transforming them into modern, scalable, user-friendly systems.

Before joining Morningstar in September 2016, Rhodes served as chief technology officer of Rocaton Investment Advisors. Rhodes joined Rocaton in 2011 after 13 years with IBM Research, where he was responsible for leading the financial modeling research efforts of IBM's Global Services business units.

Rhodes has filed more than 30 patents in the areas of financial modeling, text analytics, data mining, and data warehousing, and was named an IBM Master Inventor. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Muhlenberg College and a master’s degree in software engineering management from Carnegie Mellon University.