Edward H. Kaplan, the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations Research, Public Health and Engineering at Yale University’s School of Management, will present “Adventures in Policy Modeling!” from 4 to 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 12, in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications auditorium at 1205 W. Clark St., Urbana. A reception will follow in the NCSA atrium.
The event is part of the Illinois Distinguished Lecture Series in Operations Research, hosted by the department of industrial and enterprise systems engineering at Illinois and sponsored by Drs. Jon and Judith Liebman.
Operations research is a discipline that deals with the development and application of advanced analytical methodologies to provide decision support to complex decision-making problems in business, industry, government and other enterprises. It encompasses a wide range of problem-solving techniques and methods such as mathematical optimization, queuing theory, Markov decision processes, simulation, economic methods, data analysis, statistics, neural networks, expert systems and decision analysis.
Kaplan is an expert in operations research, mathematical modeling and statistics. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine). His research in HIV prevention and counterterrorism has been recognized with the Edelman Award, Lanchester Prize, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Charles C. Shepard Science Award, INFORMS President’s Award, three Koopman Prizes and numerous other awards.