Gary Perlman was born and raised in Montreal. Dr. Perlman's Ph.D. is in experimental psychology from the University of California, San Diego. In additional to over 20 years of consulting in information technology, he has held research and academic positions at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie-Mellon University, Ohio State University, and at the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, where he is a consulting research scientist and is primarily responsible for the the OCLC FirstSearch user interface. His research interests are in making information technology more useful and usable for people. He is the author of over 75 journal and conference articles.

He is best known in the HCI community as the director of the HCI Bibliography, http://www.hcibib.org/, a free-access online resource of over 20,000 records searched hundreds of thousands of times each year. He has held elective office in ACM SIGCHI, both at the local and international level, and has received the SIGCHI Distinguished Service Award.