Dr. Perkins graduated medical school and completed his residency at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and obtained his Ph.D. in Immunology at Boston University. He is currently a Professor of Medicine with the Division of Nephrology in the Department of Internal Medicine at the UNM School of Medicine with UNM’s Health Sciences Center. Additionally, he is Director of the Center for Personalized Medicine and Co-Director of the M.D. and Ph.D. program with the UNM School of Medicine. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School, Director of Research for Transplantation and Professor of Medicine at University of California, San Diego. His most recent role was at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where he was Professor of Medicine, Surgery, and Bioengineering, a Transplant Nephrologist, Director of Kidney Transplantation, and Director of the Metagenomic Sequencing Core.

Dr. Perkins is a physician scientist focusing on analysis of multiomics of health in disease. In particular, he has focused on the modulation of the microbiome and analysis of the transcriptome including single cell RNAseq and epigenomics. He was appointed co-director of the Innovation and Technology in Medicine (ITM) Track in the UIC Internal Medicine Residency Program as well as chair of the UIC Medical Scientist Training Program Advisory Committee in 2019.