James Perkins

James Perkins is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Systems Engineering at the College of Engineering, Boston University.

As a member of the Boston University Operations Research and Manufacturing Systems group, Professor Perkins carries out research in the field of systems engineering with emphases on control, decision analysis, and scheduling theory. Current projects that Professor Perkins is working on include: synchronization and scheduling of manufacturing systems, data mining and clustering in genetic networks, and analytical solutions of controlled queueing networks. Professor Perkins’ manufacturing-related research is performed in the Production Control of Manufacturing Systems (PCMS) Laboratory at Boston University.

Dr. Perkins received his B.A. in Engineering Science from Harvard University (1986), his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1990) and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (1993) from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He received an NSF Research Initiation Award, 1994-1998; an IBM Manufacturing Research Graduate Fellowship, 1989-1991; a John Harvard Scholarship, 1985-1986 and a Harvard College Scholarship, 1984-1985. In 2002 and 2003, Dr Perkins received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Department of Manufacturing Engineering.