Research and career
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. His research at Wisconsin centered on chemical process monitoring and control and on 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.
GNU Octave was originally developed by John W. Eaton, a doctoral student in Rawlings' research group, beginning around 1988 as companion software for an undergraduate chemical reactor design course. Rawlings has been a longtime user and advocate of the project.
