About

Edward H. Kaplan is the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations Research, Professor of Engineering, and Professor of Public Health at Yale University. His research has been widely recognized and reported in major media outlets, including the New York Times, the Jerusalem Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of more than 125 research articles and has received prestigious awards such as the Lanchester Prize and the Edelman Award in the field of operations research. Kaplan is an elected member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academies. His current research focuses on the application of operations research to problems in counterterrorism and homeland security. He has also investigated AIDS policy issues in Israel and has served as the President of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). His educational background includes a PhD and multiple master's degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BA from McGill University.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Virology
• Computer Science
• Internal medicine
• Surgery
• Environmental health
• Geography
• Operations research
• Biology
• Nursing
• Operations management
• Engineering
• Gerontology
• Environmental science
• Economics
• Psychology
• Family medicine
• Environmental engineering
• Business

Selected publications

• 456 Evaluating Junctional Tourniquet Training in Civilian Medical Personnel: A Quasi-Experimental Study

  Annals of Emergency Medicine · 2025-08-22

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Assumptions of Operations Research

  2025-04-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Operations research, originating during World War II, is the scientific study of operations aimed at improving decision-making and organizational performance. Initially focused on military logistics, its scope has expanded to address diverse operational problems in business, government, and non-profit sectors. These include scheduling, capacity planning, routing, and resource allocation. Through mathematical modeling and analysis, operations research seeks not just to describe but to optimize operations by aligning them with organizational goals such as maximizing profit, minimizing costs, or enhancing effectiveness. The field has evolved from simple problem identification to complex mathematical modeling, emphasizing the importance of framing the right problem within a well-understood system context. Applied operations research assumes that the identified problem can be modeled mathematically, that the models and assumptions are valid, and that organizational objectives and constraints are clearly defined and quantifiable. The ultimate aim is actionable recommendations that improve real-world decision-making. Grounded in the belief in mathematical rigor, operations research integrates objectives and constraints to deliver feasible solutions. By leveraging analytical tools, it supports better decision-making, ensuring that operations are not only efficient but also aligned with strategic priorities, making it a practical and impactful discipline across sectors.

  PublisherDOI

• Optimal evaluation policies to identify students with reading disabilities

  Socio-Economic Planning Sciences · 2024-12-30 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Reading disabilities affect 10-20% of students in the US. Untreated students fall behind their typically developing peers, leading to poor long-term outcomes. While instructional interventions can help, they are most effective when implemented early. Inexpensive screening tests can be used to monitor and flag at-risk students who may need expensive follow-up diagnostic evaluations that determine eligibility for intervention. However, conventional wisdom holds that the accuracy of these tests increase with grade level. Schools that do not have the capacity to do follow-up evaluations on every student flagged by screening are therefore believed to face an operational trade-off in allocating resources for evaluations, balancing the need for early intervention against budget constraints and legal obligations to honor direct parent or teacher requests. We examine how school administrators can choose evaluation policies to maximize benefits from intervention for students and ensure equitable allocation across diverse backgrounds. We model identification by optimizing over a time-dependent Bernoulli process which incorporates the screening test accuracy and the benefits from intervention at different grade levels. In collaboration with researchers from the Florida Center for Reading Research, we use longitudinal data from school districts across the state to empirically estimate these parameters and numerically solve for the optimal policies. Our study provides actionable insights for school administrators making resource allocation decisions and policy makers considering changes to laws governing the identification process. In this context, counter to conventional wisdom the screening test accuracy does not increase with grade level. To maximize the benefit to students under the current identification process, schools should simply evaluate as many students as their budget allows as early as possible. At existing budget levels, this policy also results in maximally equitable allocations. Changes to the identification process that ease legal obligations can increase benefits by up to 66% and decrease disparities by up to 100% without additional funding.

  PublisherDOI

• Finding the Optimum Mix

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022-11-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter addresses the “optimum mix” targeting study and the 1959 annual report that turned its attention to “paralyzing” the USSR, foreshadowing the counterrecovery targeting of the Nixon administration. Looking forward to a notional 1963, NESC 2009 started by laying out the problem as comparing the “relative merits from [the] point of view of effective deterrence of retaliatory efforts” with the three target systems pushed for by the navy: mostly military, mostly urban-industrial, and an “optimum mix” of the two. The optimum-mix target set became the basis for the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), which merged Strategic Air Command's (SAC) Emergency War Plans with the Navy's Polaris. The SIOP became the basis for US nuclear war planning through the end of the Cold War and beyond. It established that nuclear war fighting (and targeting) was a national affair, not a service or theater one. In doing so, the SIOP placed nuclear weapons and planning in a novel position.

  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022-10-28

  paratext1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Scaling SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentrations to population estimates of infection

  Scientific Reports · 2022-03-03 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Monitoring the progression of SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks requires accurate estimation of the unobservable fraction of the population infected over time in addition to the observed numbers of COVID-19 cases, as the latter present a distorted view of the pandemic due to changes in test frequency and coverage over time. The objective of this report is to describe and illustrate an approach that produces representative estimates of the unobservable cumulative incidence of infection by scaling the daily concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater from the consistent population contribution of fecal material to the sewage collection system.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022-11-15 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC), whose task was to determine what damage the USSR could inflict in a surprise attack. The NESC was fundamental to the creation of US nuclear strategy, and its work is virtually unknown. For twelve years, the subcommittee quantified the cost of failure. During critical moments—such as the crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others—and during day-today containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports were the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. The reports show what presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy believed were plausible outcomes of nuclear war and delineated what the presidents thought was achievable in fighting a nuclear war, as opposed to peacetime deterrence. This assessment of the cost of failure came at a pivotal time in the history of US national security, between 1950 and 1965 as the Cold War's most direct confrontations between the superpowers occurred, and the NESC is a key to understanding that moment.

  PublisherDOI

• Origins

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022-11-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter discusses how the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC) came to exist as an outgrowth of NSC 68, a key enunciation of grand strategy for the early Cold War. The chapter begins by considering the elements of airpower, atomic weapons, and the balance between offense and defense. The chapter then looks at the role of risk in military operations. NSC 68's authors believed that if the Soviets thought both that they could succeed in surprising the United States and that such a surprise would be decisive, US deterrence could fail and the risk might be unacceptable. This framed the essential question: at what point would the USSR possess an ability to attack the US decisively and with surprise? In the context of the existing war plans, when would the USSR be able to launch a surprise attack on US nuclear forces and military-associated industry such that it would derail both a US atomic offensive and conventional mobilization? On the last full day of the Truman administration, the National Security Council adopted NSC 140, establishing a Special Evaluation Subcommittee (SESC).

  PublisherDOI

• Copyright Page

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2022-11-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Extract Copyright © 2022 by Cornell University The U.S. Army War College maintains an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide, and nonexclusive license to reproduce, distribute, or display this publication for Department of Defense educational, research, or operational support. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kaplan, Edward A., author. Title: The end of victory : prevailing in the thermonuclear age / Edward Kaplan. Description: Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022005374 (print) | LCCN 2022005375 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501766121 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501766145 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501766138 (epub)

  PublisherDOI

• Predicting daily COVID-19 case rates from SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations across a diversity of wastewater catchments

  medRxiv · 2021-04-27 · 9 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Abstract We assessed the relationship between municipality COVID-19 case rates and SARS-CoV-2 concentrations in the primary sludge of corresponding wastewater treatment facilities. Over 1,000 daily primary sludge samples were collected from six wastewater treatment facilities with catchments serving 18 cities and towns in the State of Connecticut, USA. Samples were analyzed for SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations during a six-month time period that overlapped with fall 2020 and winter 2021 COVID-19 outbreaks in each municipality. We fit a single regression model to estimate reported case rates in the six municipalities from SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations collected daily from corresponding wastewater treatment facilities. Results demonstrate the ability of SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in primary sludge to estimate COVID-19 reported case rates across treatment facilities and wastewater catchments, with coverage probabilities ranging from 0.94 to 0.96. Leave-one-out cross validation suggests that the model can be broadly applied to wastewater catchments that range in more than one order of magnitude in population served. Estimation of case rates from wastewater data can be useful in locations with limited testing availability or testing disparities, or delays in individual COVID-19 testing programs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01DA007676

  NIH · $974k · 1995

• NIH Grant R01DA009531

  NIH · $3.5M · 2002

Frequent coauthors

• Lawrence M. Wein

  Stanford University

  20 shared

• Ray C. Fair

  Yale University

  16 shared

• David Craft

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  14 shared

• Harvey V. Fineberg

  Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

  13 shared

• Monica S. Ruiz

  Milken Institute

  13 shared

• Doug E. Brackney

  Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station

  13 shared

• ­Michael A. Stoto

  Georgetown University

  12 shared

• Alicia R. Gable

  Center for the Study of Healthcare Provider Behavior

  12 shared

Education

• PhD, Urban Studies and Planning

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1984

• SM, Mathematics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1982

• MCP, Urban Studies and Planning

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1979

• SM, Operations Research Center

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1979

• BA (First Class Honours), Geography

  McGill University

  1977

Awards & honors

• Distinguished Fellow Award, Manufacturing and Service Operat…
• Token of Love, Asia Pacific Operational Research Society 11t…
• INFORMS President, 2016
• Titan of Simulation, 2016
• Koopman Prize, INFORMS, 2002, 2005, 2011