Kevin Karplus (born November 30, 1954) is a professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Cruz, currently in the Biomolecular Engineering Department.

He is probably best known for work he did as a computer science graduate student at Stanford University on the Karplus–Strong string synthesis algorithm.

He made some contributions to VLSI CAD, particularly to logic minimization, where he invented the if-then-else DAG (a generalization of the binary decision diagram) and a canonical form for it, before switching to protein structure prediction and bioinformatics in 1995.

He has participated in CASP (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction) since CASP2 in 1996, and has been invited to present papers at CASP2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.

[4] He was also one of the founding members of People Power, a bicycle advocacy group in Santa Cruz.