About Dwight H. Perkins

Dwight Heald Perkins II (born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1934) is an American academic, economist, Sinologist and professor at Harvard University. He is the son of Lawrence Bradford Perkins, architect, and Margery Blair Perkins and the grandson of Dwight Heald Perkins, the architect. He married Julie Rate Perkins in 1957 and they have three adult children.

Perkins graduated in 1952 from Evanston Township High School, and earned an undergraduate degree at Cornell University in 1956. After two years military service in the US Navy, Perkins resumed his studies as a graduate student at Harvard. He earned a MA in economics in 1961 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1964. His doctoral thesis was "Price Formation in Communist China".