James B. Rawlings is an American chemical engineering professor and Mellichamp Process Control Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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.
[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.