| Birth Date: | April 3, 1957 |
| Fields: | Chemical engineering |
| Workplaces: | University of California, Santa Barbara University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Alma Mater: | University of Wisconsin-Madison (PhD) University of Texas at Austin (BS) |
| Known For: | process control, model predictive control |
James B. Rawlings is an American chemical engineering professor and Mellichamp Process Control Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on process monitoring and control, specifically the development of methods for moving horizon estimation and model predictive control in chemical processes.[1]
Rawlings earned his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He completed his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His postdoctoral research was conducted as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for System Dynamics and Process Control at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.[2]
Rawlings began his academic career at the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor in 1986 and later became an Associate Professor. In 1995, Rawlings joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Full Professor where he held the Paul A. Elfers Chair in Chemical and Biological Engineering. During his time at UW-Madison, he made significant contributions to the fields of chemical process monitoring and control, and reaction engineering at the molecular level. In 2016, Rawlings joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara as the Mellichamp Process Control Chair. His research at UCSB continues to focus on process monitoring and control, as well as computational modeling.[3]
Working with John Eaton after he finished his PhD in the Rawlings research group, Rawlings was a strong advocate and supporter of the free software project Octave, a high-level computer language for numerical simulation and analysis of chemical engineering models, which is freely available and widely used in the field.[4]
Rawlings has received numerous awards throughout his career, including:[5]