Yale School of Management

Edward H. Kaplan Honored with INFORMS Award for Distinguished Lecturing

Posted on: October 12, 2009

New Haven, Conn., October 12, 2009 — Edward H. Kaplan, the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences at the Yale School of Management, professor of public health at the Yale School of Medicine, and professor of engineering at the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science, has earned the 2009 Philip McCord Morse Lectureship Award of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The award was presented at the 2009 INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Diego on October 11.

The award honors Philip McCord Morse in recognition of his pioneering contribution to the field of operations research and the management sciences. Dr. Morse is widely considered to be the "father of operations research" in the U.S. The lectureship, which has a term of two years, involves a plenary presentation to be delivered at a future INFORMS meeting and other talks to be delivered on behalf of the profession. The award includes $2,000, a travel fund of $5,000, a copy of Morse’s autobiography, In at the Beginnings: A Physicist's Life, and a copy of Morse and George E. Kimball’s seminal text Methods of Operations Research.

In accepting the honor, Kaplan said, "While researching operations research contributions to intelligence, I looked at several papers by Phil Morse, including one published in the February 1952 issue of the Journal of Applied Physics. One sentence caught my eye: 'Here is an activity which helped save lives and win battles during the war…' Today, there are so many applications of operations research for improving business and society that in turn are made possible by advances in the underlying theory and methods of our field. But helping to save lives and win battles remains pretty high on my list."

Professor Kaplan is a past recipient of the INFORMS Koopman Prize (2003 and 2005) for the outstanding publication in military operations research; the Fellow Award (2005) for significant contributions to the advancement of operations research and the management sciences; the President’s Award (2002) for contributions to the welfare of society; the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize (1994) for the best published work in OR/MS; and the Franz Edelman Award (1992) for outstanding practice.