Highlights of his early research include: the shifting algorithm technique for tree partitioning; analysis of interpolation search; the design of periodic sorting networks; and enhancing the semantics of object-oriented databases. From 1995 to 1999, Perl was involved in the large Object-Oriented Healthcare Vocabulary Repository project supported by the NIST Advanced Technology Program.
Since 1993, Perl has worked almost exclusively in Medical Informatics, on partitioning, abstraction, visualization and auditing of medical ontologies/terminologies. He has received over $3.5 Million in federal grants from NIH/NLM/NCI for this work.
Perl is the author of almost 200 papers in international journals and conferences and the owner of three patents. In 2008, he received the Ying Wu College of Computing’s Excellence in Research College Award. In 1996, he received the NJIT Harlan J. Perlis Research Award. In 2011, he was inducted as a Fellow of the prestigious American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).