Joseph Pliskin, PhD, is Professor Emeritus at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is a member of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management and of the Department of Health Policy and Management. Prof. Pliskin also has an appointment as an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

He received his BSc degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1969) and SM (1970) and PhD (1974) degrees in Applied Mathematics (Operations Research) from Harvard University.

Prof. Pliskin’s research interests focus on clinical decision making, operations management in health care organizations, cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis in health and medicine, utility theory and decision analysis. He was the recipient of the “Career Achievement Award” from the Society for Medical Decision Making in 2005.

He has published three books and over 120 journal articles on issues relating to end stage renal disease, heart disease, Down syndrome, technology assessment, second opinion, influenza vaccination and methodological issues in decision analysis. He was the first to create and use the measure Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). He is co-author of the book Decision Making in Health and Medicine: Integrating Evidence and Values, 2nd Edition (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2014), the book Focused Operations Management for Health Services Organizations (Jossey-Bass, San-Francisco, 2006), which was translated into German and Russian, and the book The Hospital and Clinic Improvement Handbook: Using Lean and the Theory of Constraints for Better Healthcare Delivery, Oxford University Press, 2018.

In 2012, he received the “Roger L. Nichols Excellence in Teaching Award” from the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health and he also won many teaching awards at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.