In 2016, she was elected as a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and in 2021 as Distinguished Fellow of the MSOM Society in recognition of her lifetime achievement in "variational inequalities, the price of anarchy, dynamic pricing and data analytics," and her "dedicated mentorship of a future generation of OR scholars.

"[4] Perakis was born and raised in Crete, Greece where she earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Athens in 1987.

[6] Following Dafermos' death in 1990,[7] Perakis went on to work with Thomas L. Magnanti and completed her thesis titled "Geometric, Interior Point and Classical Methods for Solving Finite Dimensional Variational Inequality Problems."

Following her doctoral studies, Perakis continued in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University as a visiting assistant professor.

Between 2008 and 2015, she was the co-director of the MIT Sloan School of Management Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) Program.